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Artwork Description

Shadi Ghadirian (Tehran, 1974) is one of the most significant Middle Eastern photographers of our time. Her work explores an Iran of contrasts and paradoxes, teetering between modernity and tradition. Reflections on female identity, the ghosts of bloody conflicts (such as the Iran-Iraq War), and the ambivalence of a society constantly and precariously struggling between freedom and censorship are only some of the themes that Shadi Ghadirian examines with her unique expressive imprint. Art inspired by reality is the focal point of the contemporary Iranian scene, there are in fact many artists who have illustrated particularly traumatic historic events as for example the long and bloody Iran-Iraq War from1980 to 1988. Familiarity with conflict is a component we also find in Shadi Ghadirian’s work, above all in her photographic project Nil, Nil from 2008 in which war is portrayed literally part of every day. Warlike accessories are placed as domestic objects in apparently serene still-lifes, but which in reality hide inconvenient ghosts: bullets hiding in a cigarette holder, a gas mask in the middle of a pile of children’s toys, a grenade hiding among fruit in a bowl or a helmet placed beside a trendy foulard. With bitter but delicate sarcasm, Ghadirian shows how the reality of war has now become an integral part of the lives of the Iranians and how, silently, it has infiltrated into the intimacy of their homes.