GOLESTANI is pleased to announce a new exhibition, “A Feast of Friends”, which brings together selected positions with works by three Iranian-born artists who have emigrated to New York, and who now represent the Persian art and cultural diaspora in the United States. Despite the very different forms of work, their starting point is quite a common one: the examination of the Euro- and US-centric art canon as well as traditional motifs of the Persian cultural area in the digital age of globalization. In this way, the three artists combine different image motifs or design techniques, explore the interrelationship between analog and digital image forms in order to fathom and question the effectiveness of the archive as a cultural-historical source and expression of culture of remembrance as well as the authority to interpret digital information.

Shahrzad Changalvaee's installation “In Absentia, In Effigie” thematizes the ambivalent relationship between the dissemination of visual information and the handling of images from different cultural, historical and biographical backgrounds in the digital “age of migration”. In a black pool of water, photos from the artist's private archive swim, which she combines with found visual material. Fictional motifs float on the surface of the water alongside biographical information and photographs of historical events: Iranian folklore motifs meet photographed protests, Persian characters and scraps of English sentences. This clash of different cultural backgrounds and codes, times and places removes the motifs in front of the dark water bed from their original contexts.

The originally historically incoherent motifs are film stills that slide from a printer at the head of a ramp into the pool and thus "wander" into a new, shared context. The flow of images does not stop, the printer continues to produce. The process, the "image and content production" is central. The printed, completely analogue product is already a transformation from a film screenshot into a frozen still and finally into a haptically tangible image. The serial work of the printer and the repetition of image motifs offer a visual structure in the arbitrary stream of motifs, but only an alleged structure.