Gohar Dashti

Born 1979 in Ahvaz (Iran), he lives and works in Tehran and Berlin.

Gohar Dashti left her hometown to study photography at Tehran University, obtaining a Master of Arts in the discipline in 2005. In 2008 she sojourned in Washington on the Art Bridge Program, a scheme to promote artistic exchanges between different cultures. On the institution’s website, she states: “Growing up in the period that there were no relationships between Iran and U.S. made us (as a new Iranian generation) curious to know what [it’s] like to go and experience life in [the] U.S. As a photographer, I have always been interested in different cultures and the influences that one can affect from his/her culture.” The following year she was admitted to a Berlin artists’ residency, the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst).
 

In Toulouse, Gohar Dashti is presenting another series of photographs, Today’s Life and War, about an event – the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) – that deeply marked her generation, and the trauma that resulted. The war lasted eight years, from 1980 to 1988, which was the period of the artist’s childhood. She shows a young couple going about their everyday business against a background of reconstituted war scenes. They watch television in a bunker, hang out their washing on barbed wire, and picnic amidst abandoned soldiers’ helmets. Thus, in peacetime, even for the youngest citizens, the memory of war always makes itself felt. This heritage operates as a psychic and/or symbolic background. It is particularly well conveyed by the couple’s apparent absence of emotion.

The artist, who makes no attempt to hide the artificiality of these stagings, thus heightens the tension between reality and unreality in the images, between past events and current feelings. One emblematic photo from this series shows a couple in the middle of the desert, the woman lying on a camp bed, the man sitting and smoking a cigarette. Behind them, a squad of gas-masked soldiers are running down a hill with their guns. The contrast between the immobility and apparent tranquillity of the couple and the dynamism of the soldiers suggests that ghosts from the past are sometimes more alive, and more substantial, then the beings that are doomed to live with them. In this simple-seeming, frontal photos, Dashti tells a story which, as we gradually realise, covers several layers of time and several layers of stories, both today and yesterday, stories of the Iranian nation and of its people, all coming together in an unstable equilibrium.