Gohar Dashti. Fragile, handle with care

Volume published on the occasion of the exhibition “Gohar Dashti. Fragile, handle with care”, by Silvia Cirelli, Officine dell’Immagine Gallery, Milan, 8 February – 24 March 2018.

Always attentive to the comparison with socio-cultural issues, identity, behavioral and geopolitical issues that affect not only the Iranian reality - to which it is certainly linked - but that concern current cultural history in general, Gohar Dashti translates the precariousness of a historical moment marked by a sense of uprooting into art, the lack of communication between people and the need to belong.

With a lexical refinement strictly connected to an implicit autobiographical connotation, and a bold and incisive creative symmetry, where the aesthetics of allegory are discovered as a constant focal element, the story of this young photographer reaches authentic emotional essentiality, completely baring human vulnerabilities.

Fragile, handle with care collects his latest photographic series, artistic projects where the usual human presence, to which Gohar Dashti had always accustomed us, it is completely abandoned. We do not find again, in fact, that human component with an almost touching emotional morphology. Now, it is the overbearing and at the same time precarious force of nature that wins the scene, a nature that tries to regain its role, to restore to man that cultural memory that has been lost for too long.

In the "Home" series, this identity balance gives sublime refinement settings, forgotten places that, however, continue to absorb the melancholy power of nature. A vital energy of uncontrollable intensity seems to want to fill a silent void, creeping into every hidden corner, as if one's roots had finally freed themselves from any constraints.

Even in the "Still Life" project the artist enhances the consistency of the natural world, this time though, deconstructing its shape, in order to offer a more personal and intimate physiognomy. Plants and branches of various kinds are therefore broken, crumbled, to then be shown in a new "guise", a new, almost more human beauty, what a vegetable.