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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.








Googoosh, Iranian Singer and Actress on Stage,Before 1979


Gary Numan, Tubeway Army, 1979



Ruhollah Khomeini,
Iranian Religious Leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution,
in France


Kish Island, Iran

Farah Pahlavi, The Former Queen of Iran