The Tyranny of Autumn, Not Every Tree Can Bear

(2015 – 2016)

Lashai Foundation in collaboration with KA:V Editions

A portfolio of 22 Hand-Painted Screen-prints, accompanied by an original artwork executed by the artist, Farideh Lashai.

First launched at Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai

Shown at Art Dubai 2016

In Iran, like in many other Eastern lands the contemporary artist is dragged into two conventionally opposite directions. One direction tilts towards familiar footprints that lead to a buried but glorious past, a sense of nostalgia, fear and disgust with the mechanization and shallowness of the presently emerging culture. The other direction is an impulse of aspiration to detach from the past and to reconcile with a present that emerges in a nanosecond demolishing the previous nanosecond. In this condition of oscillation between an Oriental nostalgia and thinking in terms of nanoseconds and micro-chips, an artist such as Farideh Lashai, is able to explore her historical memory as an Iranian, in miniature sized images of a cypress tree that is reprinted thousands of times and to reconcile it with an invitation to detachment, liminal spaces, and ephemeral moments. The openness of the work invites the viewer to engage in a similar oscillation between the different senses that the work induces.

Dr. Hans Guggenheim