Homi Bhabha Professor of English and American Literature and Language and Director of Humanities Center, Harvard University writes in a preface to ‘Iranian Photography Now’ the following sentence hung on a wall of Silk Road Gallery. Since these are written by Homi Bhabha we don’t exercise the 150 words limit here. Of course you wouldn’t read it till the end either. I have written about this text as an artwork here.
‘Water and Persian Rugs’ by Jalal Sepehr, Persian carpets are made to float on the surface of the sea as if some flying carpet had suddenly landed on the waves. In one Image, a red speedboat takes a swift turn in the middle ground of the photograph, as if to part the carpet and the waves. The highly ornamental carpet is set against the ‘minimalist’ frame of endless water. Two affective and aesthetic orders—nature and artifact—are further cropped, printed and framed, so that a new relationship is forged between those images which we attribute to nature and those we attribute to culture they lie beside each other like surfaces of representation waiting to be related to one another.
What forces us to look at these two elements together as they intersect or overlap with one another is a third figure in the frame: the speedboat it is the split-second caught in the turning boat tilted to its side, emitting some spume of water in its wake. That signifies the dynamic temporality of this composition. The relationship between the traditional carpet, the eternal water and the high tech leisure craft is allegorical of the cultural hybridity of modern life, rendered almost surrealistic in this image. Beyond and within, this critical insight lies the sheer pleasure of what the artist describes as ‘new moments, color contrast a diverse quality, and making the rugs float and dance in the water.’