The Iranian Series 2017-01-23T20:57:19+00:00

Project Description

The Iranian Series

2001-2004
Iron box, photograph, sandpaper, gold leaves, 31x21x2 cm
Iron, glass, photograph, 51x51x1 cm

In Lilac Sasson’s works, the tension between enchanted and threatening images effectively neutralizes their exotic beauty.

In the slide series, the images act as echos of scenes documenting ancient Persian iconography. The normally miniature slide, enlarged to a monumental scale, embodies a tension between the simulated and the real, between the slide that preserves the 2,500 year­old-memory and the old slides’ physical frames, which have been worn out over time.

The viewer is caught between focusing his or her attention on the exotic imagery and the wish to examine the physicality of the slide.

The “Iranian Series” is based on photographs from Roger Wood’s Persia, published at the end of the Sixties.

The works try to expose the hidden threat behind the visual illusion of the Orientalist imagery, made up of both anthropological representations and the ancient cultural landscape portrayed in the photographs.

The spectator’s gaze is blocked, as though obstructed by a veil that conceals the enchanting object of temptation, and postpones the immediate satisfaction of glancing into an exotic world. This dynamic generates a more personal spectatorship, imbued with the tension between attraction and fear, between the near and the remote, and between the familiar and the mysterious.

Through a process of concealment and exposure, the images metamorphose into newly restyled forms whose disturbing, partial presence rises out of their veiled wholeness.

(Nirith Nelson – curator, Miskenot Sha’ananim, Jerusalem, 2003)