Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Iran

"When I went back to Iran in 1991 I went looking for remnants of my past in the city I was born, Shiraz. I saw the entire old town which connected the two main mosques demolished to make way for a new grand parking space. All was gone but a few pieces of broken doors and bricks. I would gather them as if they were museum pieces.

The portrait on the artwork is part of a hand painted movie poster done before the revolution which I also loved as a child. I went looking for them and when I went back all I could find was a few torn pieces in the storage rooms of film distribution companies.

These materials were my obsession which I turned into a series of works which I never exhibited. They were like my personal diary"

- Farhad Moshiri

Bonhams are delighted to offer this seminal mixed media work by Farhad Moshiri, executed in 1994, it is the earliest work by Moshiri to come to public auction. Rare and exceptional, it harks from a formative period in the artist's oeuvre, demonstrating the stylistic influences he was subject to during his time in America and shedding light on the inception of his artistic agenda.

Whilst Moshiri's principle concern as an artist has been to capture and reflect the unease engendered by the cultural decay and disfigurement prevalent in post-revolutionary Iran, his training at the California Institute of the Arts would have a profound effect on the makeup of his subsequent work. Drawing heavily from the artistic vocabulary of the proto-pop art movement, the present piece adopts the visual schema of the "Combine", a format championed by Robert Rauschenberg in the 1950's.

Straddling the boundary between sculpture and painting, the Combine is concerned with dimensionality and the spatial relationship between artwork and observer. For Rauschenberg, the inclusion of everyday objects on canvas took art out of the realm of the intangible and brought it into the sphere of the viewer; this was motivated by the belief that art which inhabited the same space as its audience was more embedded in the fabric of reality. This vernacular, worldly medium would therefore enjoy a more fertile and meaningful dialogue with the viewer; the result is in art that was truly constructed out of the language of its surroundings.

Whilst Rauschenberg held that the meaning-pregnant element of his work was found in the act of the transference of the object, and not any particular embellishment or transformation it underwent as a result of its inclusion in the Combine, Moshiri diverges from this conceptual foundation.

For Moshiri, the transformation and manipulation of the objects he includes in his Combine are an overarching element of his artistic agenda, which is an invocation of the anxiety engendered by societal decay. Moshiri's Combine is populated by culturally significant objects, the traditional wooden doors and geometrical tribal textiles that are quintessential artisanal elements of the traditional Iranian homestead.

Moshiri, however, presents these to us in decontextualised fragments, broken and incomplete, they have forfeited the sense of belonging and relevance they once enjoyed in the cultural sphere that gave rise to them. Presented as they are, torn, aggregated like assemblages of refuse, Moshiri bemoans the extinction of the cultural vitality which once animated them.

Through their inclusion in the Combine Moshiri's assemblages take on a symbolic significance, serving as a cautionary tale of the casualties of cultural transformation, where values, traditions and intangible heritage are threatened and distorted. Moshiri directly questions us through the cryptic inscriptions that punctuate the Combine, beseeching us, we who are custodians of these cultural objects and have now neglected them, do we feel no remorse?

Moshiri is almost didactic in his treatment of the subject; the door serves as a portal, inviting us to enter the domain of the artwork and explore the repository of meaning held within. The inscription "half an hour to sunrise" evokes a dreamlike quality to the work, indicating that Moshiri's message is directed squarely at our subconscious, and his depiction of an eye with its gaze fixed on the viewer implores the audience to look into to themselves. This form of self-reflective illustration is as old as civilization itself, and recalls the dictum recorded on the famed Omphalos stone at the oracle of Delphi carved over 2,000 years ago, which read "γνθι σεαυτόν" , "know thyself", a plea poignantly echoed in Moshiri's Combine.

Within the anthology of Moshiri's oeuvre, the Combines are perhaps his most aesthetically sophisticated, artistically subtle and stylistically avant-garde creations. Rare, never exhibited, they are deeply personal to Moshiri's development, snapshots of a period where his artistic sentiments were taking shape.

In employing extant objects and the visual paraphernalia of his surroundings, Moshiri has created what Rauschenberg has referred to as a "space of memory", within which are salvaged objects who, whilst once neglected as waste by their keepers, have now become precious and immortal in the visual setting in which they are cast.