By Nazanine Nouri
The Iranian-born photographer Gohar Dashti featured prominently at the recent edition of Paris Photo, a major international fair dedicated to photography and held this year in the newly restored Grand Palais, the monumental century-old exhibition hall.
Dashti – the only Iranian artist participating in the 27th edition of Paris Photo – was exhibited in the booth of the Photographers’ Gallery. Much of her work draws on her memories of growing up during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), and on Iranians’ relationship with their country’s cultural and political history.
Dashti was born in the Iranian city of Ahvaz, not far from the Iraqi border in 1980, shortly before the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War. She received her Master of Arts in photography from the Tehran University of Art in 2005. In her large photographs, she uses a unique, quasi-theatrical aesthetic to express her perception of the world around her.
Having grown up during the Iran-Iraq War, Dashti drew on her memories of that period to produce her “Home” series (2017), which was prominently on display at Paris Photo, and which represents the consequences of war and displacement on places that were once defined as ‘home.’
All of the abandoned houses depicted in this series once belonged to people who emigrated for political and social reasons. The houses are now devoid of any sense of ‘home,’ meaning comfort, security and human life. They are instead consumed by plants that have conquered and claimed the houses as their own. All traces of humanity are gone, and the houses have succumbed to nature.
“Usually my work starts with a personal perspective, but the ‘Home’ series is not only a personal exploration of nature, but also about how nature can be political: how, when you have to move out, what happens to your roots in the place: what happens to the environment when the human population are displaced or destroyed by war,” Dashti said in a video conversation released by the Photo London fair in 2022. “People are transient, while nature is constant. It will be there long after we are all gone.”
Dashti’s thought-provoking series, though the figment of the artist’s imagination, prompts viewers to reflect on man’s place in the natural world, and expresses the ephemerality of humankind.
Dashti’s photography is now part of the permanent collections of museums including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Smithsonian Museum, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago.
She has been awarded numerous art fellowships, including among others the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Umbertide (2024), V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography (2023), ISP Research Residency Grant at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Museum für Islamische Kunst (2023), and MacDowell, Peterborough, NH (2017 & 2021).
Dashti was a visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) between 2023 and 2024.
Paris Photo was held in the French capital from Nov. 7 to 10.
