LOS ANGELES — Craft Contemporary presents The Charm of the Unfamiliar, artist Pouya Afshar’s multi-media story of displacement, migration, and resiliency. Using historic portraiture and animation techniques, digital applications, and augmented reality, the exhibition follows the fictional narrative of a group of migrants that relocate to an abandoned city that had once been an amusement park. The displaced in this narrative are hybrid personas – human and animal, some real, some mythical – each physically transformed by their experiences of migration. These hybrid beings embody the toll of displacement and the adaptation and strength migration require and reflect the dehumanization and exoticizing of immigrants and refugees that continues to this day in the United States. Through this work, Afshar aims to open up dialogue about global refugee crises, U.S. immigration policy, and the realities immigrants face when they do make it to the land of the so-called “American Dream.” “Artists are the ones recording the history,” says Afshar. “One has to live, breathe and feel the surroundings alongside the characters they create.” Essayists S.A. Bachman and Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond writing for the upcoming monograph, In Character: Pouya Afshar Selected Works 2010 to 2020, say of the series, “Art doesn’t open borders or cages, but what if viewers are prompted to fathom how it would be to inhabit the dehumanized forms of Afshar’s landscape, to grasp the lived experiences of beings treated as expendable, including homosapiens but also crows, pigs, donkeys, camels, horses, and sheep?”