Gohar Dashti: Across Land and Sea

We are excited to announce the first UK solo exhibition from Gohar Dashti (b.1980, Iran), opening in our Print Sales Gallery on 23 September.

 

Dashti was born in Ahvaz, a city in southwestern Iran, in the early years of the Iranian revolution. Her large-scale, conceptual photographs draw upon her experiences growing up during the Iran-Iraq war. Rooted in ideas of connection to, and disconnection from, her own home, Dashti’s images are equally charged with universal ideas of displacement, migration, and belonging.

 

Bringing together five bodies of work, ‘Gohar Dashti: Across Land and Sea’ charts the development of Dashti’s practice over the past eight years. Meticulously constructing singular, often surreal, scenes, her process can be likened to that of a filmmaker, creating visual meditations on the effects of geo-political conflict, and what is left behind. Dashti’s practice has always centred around an attentiveness to the natural world; over time her depiction of the land, sea, and sky has evolved.

 

The limitless reach of nature and landscapes – that reach across cultural and political divisions –as well as the ways in which immigrants inevitably search out and reconstruct familiar topographies in a foreign land, together tell a story familiar to all humans.

– Gohar Dashti