April 12 2018 | By Sammy Preston for Yellowtrace
Iranian Abandoned & Overgrown Homes Captured By Gohar Dashti
Iranian photographer Gohar Dashti was born in Ahwaz, during the 1980s and amidst the devastation of the Iran-Iraq war. She’s now one of Iran’s most prevalent artistic exports, and has work in the collection of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and has exhibited in Rio, Toronto, Paris, Berlin, Boston, and Milan. Wartime and the displacement of people from home and landscape permeate her images. Gohar’s most recent series of work is Home—a collection of abandoned rooms and homes now taken over by nature.
Taken in her native Iran, the series reveals homes overrun with moss, yellowing pines, towering stalks of wheat, piled vines, and a bed of red, yellow, and violet poppies. Each image is a little jarring—where the natural world seems alien and forceful and potent in a once-upon-a-time human setting, now devoid of humans. For Gohar, Home is a personal exploration of nature. But there is politics here too: nature always finds a way, even in the most adverse of settings, and a new post-war world has sprouted amongst the ruins of what’s passed and been destroyed. People, and our fraught lives filled with things, however, are more ephemeral.
Gohar Dashti received her M.A. in photography from the Art University of Tehran in 2005. For the past 15 years she has been making large scale photography with a particular focus on social issues. Her work references history and contemporary culture, as well as the convergence of anthropological and sociological perspectives; employing a unique, quasi-theatrical aesthetic, she brings to bear a diverse intellectual and cultural experience to illuminate and elaborate upon her perception of the world around her.
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