Ag Galerie is proud to present Hall of Reflections by Iranian-American San Francisco-based artist, Taraneh Hemami. This multi-dimensional installation, is influenced by the mirrored talar-e ayineh, the traditional gathering hall of historical buildings in Iran. Hemami re-appropriated old family album photographs intertwined with Persian and Islamic patterns and motifs and text from personal letters, and printed them on mirrors. These images and texts present a unique cross-generational and cross-cultural mix of private testimony, family photographs and narratives of Iranians who have migrated to Northern California, encountered displacement and assimilated to the Bay Area.
The completion process of this exhibition extends through a number of years of community work, which still continues. Through a series of workshops and interviews with the collaboration of many local Iranian-American organizations and writers such as Persis Karim, Shahrnush Parsipour and Zari Taheri, Hemami explores themes of loss, preservation, displacement and belonging, specific to the historical experience of Iranian immigrants.
This installation was also exhibited at the 6th Sharjah Biennial in spring 2003, as a response to the relentless bombing of Baghdad that began the war in Iraq and displaced millions of Iraqis.