A Thousend and One Days I-III – Parastou Forouhar

A subversive twist on the one thousand and one nights, all of the works in A Thousend and One Days I-III show faceless figures enacting scenes of torture. In digital drawings, the silhouetted pink bodies that emerge from symmetrical yet irregular black patterns (reminiscent of Rorschach inkblot tests) are interlaced with but also strangled by the meandering elegant arabesque lines resembling the characters in Persian calligraphy. Yet, the stylistic and iconographic elements link these works to the Persian past, and the content alludes to abuses in contemporary Iran, the piles of naked bodies, blindfolds, and leashes also bring to mind images and accounts of violence and torture that circulated in the media after the revelations in 2004 of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and in other U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. Therefore the works show violence embedded in all structures of power. Joanna Inglot

A Thousend and One Days III, 2012 Part of the multi-media project Thousand and one Days, consisting of digital drawings, wallpaper, balloon installation, flip books and animations; Marching Bands and Just a Minute Series of 6 digital drawings, digital print on Photo Rag, all 55 X 35 cm