Firouz FarmanFarmaian's Retro Projection transports the artist and us, the viewer,further back through a specific selected set of re-fictionalised images of the Orient, Specifically to 19th Century Persia.

A cluster of symbols takes the artist back to his Grandfather's salon in Paris, his mentor,and to his collections of photographs of Persia under the Qajar era. Drawing on the archives of the vast collection of Qajar photographs in the Smithsonian Institute, aswell as his family collection, FarmanFarmaian selects images or windows on destinies and re-imagines them through a digital process, printing and interventions combining

natural pigments, acrylic and Majorelle blue. Reshaping the past in the context of contemporary practice, Retro Projection is a personal search, the illumination of a lost time, an absorption of the tradition ofcommemorative art and an important act of meditation.

Janet Rady, CURATOR