In the Summer at The Caspian series, I worked on the forging of personal mythologies. Nostalgia of an unknown, or better said, of what was not to be known. Pre-revolution Iran and its contingencies, here brought to a personal family-related level, exploring the pre and post emotions of exile and its relation to memory and future.

In FarmanFarmaian’s ongoing series, Summer at the Caspian II - V, the artist leads us back to hazy family summers spent in the North of Iran, captured on Super 8 mm film. Too young to have witnessed these scenes personally, he appropriates the memory of this former era through snapshots, serenely faded through the prism of time. Overlain with digitally layered ground plans of the artist’s family former properties on the Caspian and stained with splashes of archival mark making, these enduring images reside in an orphaned, timeless zone, not forgotten, not past.