Gypsum Gallery is delighted to present Spectral Days, a photo-based exhibition by Setareh Shahbazi. Spectral Days is a deeply personal project that delves into a loaded family history. It conjures up memories of Shahbazi and her family’s exile from Iran following the revolution and of her eventual return back to the land she was once forced to leave. It is an introspective look into the past that started in 2009 when Shahbazi began her forage into thousands of family photographs retrieved from her home in Tehran. A long process of scanning, cropping, layering and manipulating ensued. The outcome is Spectral Days, a series of more than forty haunting images in various sizes that form a stylistic departure from her signature comic strip visual aesthetic – a collection of photomontages that resides in the hazy transition between the past and its remembrance.

Cool flat surface has given way to a dense compression of translucent layers. The vivid palette of Spectral Days modulates between midnight and blazing sunset. The exception is a handful of soft rose tinted pictures of group family photos, foliage and abstract colour field prints. The overall effect is delicate and bewildering.

Spectral Days quietly questions the sanctity of the photographic medium both as an artistic form and as a record of the past. Shahbazi’s handling of the source material is irreverent. The scanning is rough; the image is often pixelated. Fragments of pictures are duplicated within the same frame while positive and negative images are used interchangeably.

Shahbazi plays with the conventions of linear narration by transforming analogue physical objects into transient digital spaces, and back. The photographs become fluid animated spaces, reimagined each time you look at them, rousing a train of memories in which the logic of reality does not exist.