Unfamiliar Territory No. 2 by Amirhossein Bayani – Limited Edition Print

Unfamiliar Territory No. 2 by Amirhossein Bayani

Amirhossein Bayani’s vividly coloured and highly detailed works explore themes around life, immigration, and freedom with a particular focus on the struggles of women. Working in the tradition of landscape works, his latest series The Season of Ruin’s Remembrance employs natural elements both as a way of expressing complex emotional states and envisioning a more harmonious future.

Each of the works in the series The Season of Ruin’s Remembrance was inspired by a real-life story of a woman who fought for freedom and lost her life. Rather than illustrating their heroic and tragic tales, however, Bayani envisions these figures in other-worldly forest settings: they appear memorialised as statues or else as tiny, translucent spirits, glimpsed between the trees, standing on a rock or on the edge of a lake.

At first glance, these landscapes may seem to be paradisal, bursting with colour and life, but there is also an eeriness to the scenes: the shades of green are vivid to the point of being luminous, the foliage so dense it creates a kind of wall, blocking out the light. ‘This tension between beauty and horror, for me, describes the struggle for emancipation,’ says Bayani. ‘It all depends on your perspective.’