Gohar Dashti

Untitled #1

Zohar Dashti’s Untitled #1 from the photographic series Slow Decay presents a haunting tableau that captures the ongoing impact of conflict on everyday life in Iran. This particular photograph portrays a sleeping young girl, her head gently resting on a wooden table. Despite her serene expression, next to the girl sits a rotary phone, the numbers covered in blood, which also pools beneath it, seeping through the cracks in the table. The starkness of the scene is amplified by Dashti’s use of muted colors and minimal composition, emphasizing a sense of insidious peril. The artist writes that works from the series Slow Decay depict moments of domestic “fatigue and misery”, representing the collective memory of civilians who have tolerated extreme violence for generations. Intentionally refraining from referencing specific events, the untitled photographs in this series suggest a universality to the scenes, as if they could be any place or time touched by the ravages of war. Thus, Dashti’s work invites viewers to reflect on the enduring nature of the invisible suffering that occurs in the wake of conflict.