Curated by Silvia Cirelli, the exhibition represents an important opportunity to explore the artistic career of this talented and multifaceted interpreter, bringing together a selection of works never exhibited in Italy.
Already appreciated in the international art scene, Jalal Sepehr in recent years has been able to distinguish himself with a very personal expressive imprint, capable of capturing the ambivalences and complexities of the Iranian social fabric, and above all showing its multiform contradictions. Perpetually poised between the search for modernity and the need to safeguard tradition, Iran remains one of the most fascinating Middle Eastern countries, and its articulated and composite socio-cultural structure, paradoxically, is characterized by one of the most extraordinary creative vivacity in the panorama contemporary.
After various exhibitions in several European countries, Jalal Sepehr finally arrives in Italy with As far as the eye can see, an exhibition project that traces the poetic synthesis of the last ten years of this eclectic artist, focusing above all on those photographic series and on those stylistic modalities that most significantly marked its lexical uniqueness, such as the use of the Persian carpet as a distinctive feature.
The exhibition opens with the recent series Red Zone (2015), a project of almost lacerating intensity, which reveals the intimate dimension of a people - not specifically Iranian, but of the Middle East in general - forced to live in a daily life in alarm, precisely in a red zone, where threat and danger are the only faithful travel companions. On a long walkway, made of splendid Persian carpets, now a huge boulder fallen from the sky, now a violent sandstorm, or an airplane that has just taken off, they seem to regularly obstruct the passage, making any escape route difficult .
The carpet also returns as a central element in the surreal setting of Water and Persian Rugs, from 2004, instead becoming an imaginary bridge between past and present, a magnetic slippery surface that one is forced to cross, if one really wants to be the protagonist of one's own time , without being too afraid of the unexpected. Then follow the suggestive Knot series of 2011 and the work Girl and the Mirror of 2010, both created between the walls and the characteristic clay domes of the splendid ancient city of Yazd, in central Iran. Finally, the exhibition closes with Sepehr's latest photographic project, Color As Gray (2014-2016), which with elegant fragility questions the dramatic reality of war, now an everyday element in many Middle Eastern countries. A sad testimony of how much the wounds of these conflicts never manage to heal.
Jalal Sepehr was born in Tehran (Iran) in 1968, where he currently lives and works. He started photography in 1995, learning by himself. After a three-year experience in Japan, Sepehr returned to Iran, where he founded the site Fanoos Photo together with photographer Dariush Kiani. To his credit he has numerous participations in international exhibitions and festivals, such as Pulso Iraniano at Oi Futuro in Rio de Janeiro (2011); the PX3 Festival (France), the Peking Art Photography Festival (China), the Australian Photography Festival in Sydney (2014) or the International Photo Festival in Belgium (2009).
