Strangely Familiar

A joint project with Bethan Hughes

Print Design / Installation Design
Bauhaus Universität Weimar / Marienstrasse 9 / Weimar / DE
2013

(Screen-printed wallpaper, Television with 1 hour looped video,
3 slide projectors, Projection stand, Photocopied exhibition booklet)

'Strangely Familiar' explores the idea of a contrasting but also shared cultural heritage in both Iran and the UK. Based on a vast collection of pop cultural material gathered by the artists and produced in the years immediately preceding and following 1979, the final installation displays a glut of images, videos and sounds.When viewed together, these conjure a particular series of emotions and connotations, both historical and contemporary, the juxtaposition of media from different cultural backgrounds being simultaneously unsettling yet familiar. The theatrical trope of a foil curtain, witnessable in many of the collection's images and videos, is reproduced on paper, a decorative static hum which provides a backdrop onto which media plays, an endlessly repeating series of slide projections and video clips.

Ultimately, the work aims to examine the surreal phenomenon of witnessing ones cultural background from a geographically and generationally removed position; an inward and outward view onto what is at once understandable, relatable and known but simultaneously incomprehensible, disassociated and unknown.