Dissonance

Gohar Dashti’s photographs of Iran take on new resonance amidst the global pandemic.

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Iranian-born artist Gohar Dashti makes photographs that depict the human response to conflict and upheaval. At its core, her work is about our need for connection and security as we adapt to changing circumstances. Her images take on new layers of meaning at a time of global pandemic.

Dashti was born in 1980, the year after Iran was plunged into revolution and which, in September of that year, saw the start of a grinding, brutal eight-year war with Iraq. The hardships and uncertainties of political upheaval and war have continued to mark her work. 

Her exhibition, Dissonance, is no exception. It was scheduled at the West Vancouver Art Museum as part of Vancouver’s Capture Festival, a major region-wide celebration of photo-based art held each April in venues ranging from major galleries to coffee shops. Last month, the festival found itself rethinking how it could function with venues closing and residents avoiding others and sheltering at home to prevent the spread of a deadly new virus. 

Dashti’s show would certainly have attracted visitors – Vancouver’s North Shore has seen a big influx of immigrants and refugees from Iran in recent decades. But the museum, like so many other cultural spaces, is closed. The festival is providing more digital content to bring shows to the public in virtual form. And the museum has posted Dashti’s images.

“The pandemic might affect all people in the world,” says Dashti, who recently relocated from Tehran to Boston. “It is still new for all of us. All my exhibitions, talks and events are cancelled or postponed. All of the museum doors are closed. I should find a new way to communicate to my audience.”

Dashti has produced several bodies of work in recent years. Some of her most striking images are from a series called Stateless. One image shows a couple embracing, their belongings neatly arrayed beside them as if ready for travel. Behind them is the stark beauty of a desolate and unforgiving desert landscape carved and sculpted by the elements over millenniums. Another image shows a mother and child about to turn and walk away, to disappear into that landscape. They carry suitcases and the mother shields the child’s eyes. A rough stone-lined path suggests the route is well trodden. 

The scenes in Stateless were photographed at Qeshm Island in the Persian Gulf, which was submerged by the sea in ancient times. It’s an alienating environment, even for Iranians. For Dashti, it represents the unfamiliar. Each image reflects a human predicament and each holds a mute but engrossing drama.

The images bring to mind American photographer Peter Menzel’s fascinating project, Material World: A Global Family Portrait, in which families around the world are pictured outside their homes with all their worldly possessions. The project is meant to draw attention to the different circumstances in various cultures around the world. 

Stateless reminds us how sudden crises can drive us to flee, and the painful choices we must make about what to take with us. Here in Canada, at least in recent memory, we are less likely to have known a time when it was prudent to have a packed suitcase by the door in case of war or social upheaval. Yet now, amidst a rapidly unfolding pandemic, how many of us find ourselves with burdens we can no longer manage, and an urge to flee, if only there were somewhere safe to go.

Dashti’s Home series is more circumspect. It evokes the domestic and social spaces left behind and how nature so quickly begins to reclaim them. Shot mostly in abandoned buildings in the Iranian city of Mashhad, her images seem like sets for an art house movie, perhaps one never made by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, who often crafted scenes using spaces of cultural and personal significance that have been left to the elements. 

The most striking image for me shows an abandoned university or medical building, where rows of trees appear to be dying, green turning to brown and yellow. They are a mute audience aging in place, possibly never to see a return of the inhabitants.

These images remind me of Alan Weisman’s 2007 non-fiction book, The World Without Us, which examines how cities suddenly abandoned by humans due to some political circumstance or other catastrophe crumble into ruins as they are reclaimed by flora and fauna. 

Dashti’s series is evocative amidst the current pandemic for we’re already hearing reports of cleaner air and water as economic activities slow and people in locked-down cities shelter in place. Dashti emphasizes, though, that her primary interest is in human presence. “Maybe you cannot see the people,” she says. “But it’s about the people.”

These images are orderly, as if we could control, even in our absence, how regrowth unfolds. The buildings she depicts are not the desolate ruins we see in the news from war zones, like Idlib in Syria. Instead, they seem to represent a dream of home, a belief that lost places will be cared for somehow. 

Her images present spaces that might have been invaded by an invisible foe, like the virus now wreaking havoc around the globe. They remind us that our homes, our places of refuge, are always temporal. Yet the simple beauty of the photographs anchors a bittersweet hope that return is possible. 

Dashti’s Uprooted series depicts various desert plants suspended against a neutral grey backdrop, their roots dangling in mid-air as if just wrenched from the earth.The framing of these hardy species underscores that even those able to endure extreme conditions are vulnerable.

At first, the photographs felt too obvious, but then I locked on to the absence of dirt around the roots, the lack of any kind of footing or support. Possibly this pandemic has left us feeling adrift, acutely uncertain about what’s to come, making it easy to desire terra firma once again. 

Dashti’s work feels necessary. It binds us to world events and people in crisis. Iran was hit hard and early by COVID-19. Now, the virus, a borderless traveller, has come for us. More than anything, this crisis reminds us of the collective duty we hold for each other. 

Dashti thinks the pandemic helps us understand other people who have faced hardships, whatever the cause. “Now, even people who don’t have any experiences about war or migration have much more understanding about isolation,”she says.

The reality is that we are all potential refugees – a rental cheque, a mortgage payment, a job loss or a business collapse away from personal crisis – and that only collective action will nourish our roots and allow us to flourish again.  ■ 

Gohar Dashti’s exhibition, Dissonance, was to run at the West Vancouver Art Museum  from March 17 to May 9, 2020. Although the museum is closed until at least the end of June, more of Dashti's images can be seen here.

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