The Wapping Project Bankside will host an exhibition by the British-Iranian photographer and film-maker Mitra Tabrizian starting the 21 September until 2 November 2012. The series presented is called Another Country and it has remained unseen from when it was released in 2010.
Mitra Tabrizian was born in Tehran. Her roots has been crucial in developing her vision as an artist. The exhibition reflects the idea of homeland, the perception of hybrid cultural identities, the reality of everyday life in the UK for Muslim communities from the Middle East.
The series of 8 large-scale group and individual portraits shows true stories of real people. Immigrants and their children, who have come to Europe from the Middle East or North Africa. Some of the children were born in the UK.
The protagonists of the artworks seem lost in between the space and the time, between their present and their wishes to come back some day.
“In this context, which challenges the polarity of identifications, the title ‘Another Country’ no longer refers to some other country out there, but to a culture within, or more accurately to the past,” Tabrizian said.
The exhibition also includes Untitled (2009), a monumental photograph capturing a group of young Iranian students in the desert. The figures are positioned in an uncomfortable middle distance in the picture; too far from the objective to be portraits, but too close to be backgrounds.
Untitled (2009) was shot shortly before the protests disputing the results of the 2009 Iranian presidential election broke out.
The artist has had a solo exhibition at Tate Britain in 2008 and in Stockholm in 2006. She will exhibit Light from the Middle East at the Victoria and Albert Museum in November 2012.
Edited by: Matilde Casaglia
Artworks by: Mitra Tabrizian
