Shirana Shahbazi

New Good Luck, 2019
Edited by Manuel Krebs
Publisher: Sternberg Press, Berlin.

Softcover, 29 x 19 cm, 30 pages, English

 

New Good Luck presents a new series of photographic works by Shirana Shahbazi. Taken during the artist’s three-month stay in India, the photos, often of solitary people in architectonic space or a landscape, have been taken apart and reshaped through a digital collage technique, their color removed or reconfigured. Carefully selected areas of luminous color are layered on top of one another, sometimes protruding far beyond the edges of the actual scene, flowing together with selected openings, or breaking open the composition like a prism. The effect is to dissolve motifs from the journey, fragmenting them from their original narratives. Similar to previous series by Shahbazi such as “Tehran North” (2015), these works explore how the encounters experienced during travel can be perceived photographically without being determined by the visual power and cultural charge of their original colors.