Zahra Amiryeganeh

Zahra Amiryeganeh lives in Bandar Anzali, a city that has exerted the strongest influence on her work. Bandar Anzali has a remarkable tradition of painting. Many of the city’s painters—of whom there are no few—have made the city itself their subject: its urban spaces and landmarks, its coastline, old buildings, fishermen, and the sea. Yet many of them depict Anzali as they wish it had been, or as it once was: a city suspended in an aura of splendor and enchantment, whose tangible presence has now receded, surviving instead in the painter’s imagination.

Zahra, by contrast, paints the city as it exists today: a city in decline, from whose former beauty and splendor only a trace of allure and a lingering shadow remain. Its people are absent; what remains are empty buildings—a suggestion, perhaps, of how the city’s fading beauty has caused us to lose sight of the beauty it once possessed, just as we ourselves have been forgotten by the city.

In Zahra’s works for the Continuum initiative, the city has not only forgotten its inhabitants; it has forgotten itself. It is no longer even a continuous whole. The city’s familiar and beloved buildings have been detached from their surroundings, left isolated and adrift within a space that seems to correspond to the very character of the city—like a distant image from the imagination, untouched by thought for years, or a memory in the process of disappearing. Something of the whole remains in these works, but its relationship to that whole has been severed.

This condition is not expressed solely through the separation of the buildings from their surroundings; the chromatic quality of the works reinforces it as well. Zahra draws upon the cool palette associated with Anzali’s humid, coastal climate, yet situates these colors across the picture surface in such a way that the boundary between the city and its surrounding environment begins to dissolve. Blue, gray, and green are no longer simply markers of the sea, the sky, and the landscape of Gilan; alongside the weathered surfaces of the buildings, they take on a muted, worn quality. It is as though the city is not positioned in opposition to nature, but is gradually absorbed into it.