Opening at Aaran Gallery on 19th January 2018

Art has been my instrument to return to my roots. To wounds, joys, childhood, war and all that has created duality in me. In these years I have been preoccupied with realities and experiences of past and present, I go back and forth. The images in this exhibition are the result of my deliberations and reminders or my encounters with the events that shape my life, next to my day dreams.
Art for me is articulation of my lived experience that is often entwined with events in my country and the region that I live in. The joys and sorrows that involves a generation, and living in a region with different ethnic groups with diverse languages and cultures, sharing a common inheritance which is woven with threads of fear and pain.
The woven works are the result of anxious moments. These dates came in to my life after the death of my cousin in the city of Mosel. Date is a fruit that grows in both of my lands: that of my birth place and the one that I live in.
My joy and laughter after each city is liberated, my fears and screams when another city falls to ruins; all of it flows in me simultaneously. This is part of the life of thousands, millions of people living in Middle East: always anxious, always expecting: that rain that is supposed to fall on fire, when will it rain down on our torched easterly land.*
Shirin Mellatgohar

• Sogol Moghavvem Ghafari