Farnaz Gholami's interests lie in issues around geographical, cultural, and social dislocation. She is a painter who creates multi-layered works, using varying paint textures and glazes to conceal and reveal parts of an unknown narrative in usually unpopulated landscapes or interiors. The oddly unfamiliar nature of these places creates an uneasy visual balancing act between imagination and reality, abstraction and form, suggesting a different in-between place.

Many works in the exhibition, in particular the ‘Palace’ paintings, were inspired by J. G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise. Gholami investigates what she considers to be the liminal space between utopia and dystopia through her paintings of the Pearl Palace and those of the western style cinema theatres in her home city of Tehran.

The exhibition consists of works varying in scale: large canvases depict fragments of the facades of the cinema theatre buildings, whereas the small paintings are more abstract and undefined.

Through fragmented imagery and layered painting planes, Gholami has created a space of her own that has departed from reality but represents her memories of those buildings of her homeland and it is this remembered and mysterious world that we visit through the paintings in this exhibition.