Head On Festival – Signature Time & Place, Iran – An exhibition by Nuran Zorlu

Signature Time and Place – Iran

There are many faces that a country can project. The most obvious is the political face and in the case of the country of Iran, the most common portrayal of it’s face in the western press is of a strict religious and politically outcast state.

Unfortunately what does not get discussed very often is the cultural face of the country. Iran, being the latest incarnation of a centuries old Persian empire, engulfs so many  distinct cultures and ethnicities. Today Iran actively engages in the preservation of all these varied heritages; something that sadly no other country in the region seems inclined to do. It is for this reason that as a member of one of those communities I have conducted a long term personal project to document artifacts and customs that have survived for thousands of years, but may well be on the verge of disappearing from my native regions of the Middle East.

In order to appreciate who we are as a society it is important to understand where we have come from and how we have created concrete artifacts that embellish our cultures. We need to reference the past in words, such as scriptures, song or poetry. We also need to do this visually. It may be painted artwork, sculpture, architecture or simply photographic representations of life style. It’s these visuals that I seek to preserve as the inevitable morphing of cultures takes place over time.
 

Nuran Zorlu Sydney based commercial and portrait photographer ,although he is a specialist in jewellery photography, likes to photograph variety of subjects from landscapes to cars , travel to portraits.
He is very passionate about preserving the cultural dignities, through his project he travels to Middle East to documenting areas which not very familiar to many people of the planet. With his photography and philosophy, he likes to create a bridge between this landscapes, architectural details and people  to viewers.

Exhibition Date: 27 May – 12 June 2011

Head On Festival – Impersonating Mao – An exhibition by Nathalie Daoust

Impersonating Mao

The work of Montreal-born photographer, Nathalie Daoust, maps the blurred boundary between reality and imagination to explore ideas of fantasy and escape. For her new project, ‘Impersonating Mao’, Daoust focuses on the interior world of an impersonator who assumes the appearance and bearing of Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China. Daoust’s portraits record her subject’s desire to flee reality and take refuge in a dream world of half-truth and illusion.

When Daoust first met her subject in 2008 – posing as Mao in Tiananmen Square as an act of personal homage – she was intrigued by his construction of an alternate identity from the iconography of his country’s troubled past. In 2010, she returned to Beijing and photographed the impersonator extensively, both in a domestic setting and at sites of historic importance. The juxtaposition allowed Daoust to interrogate communist China’s complicated relationship to Mao’s legacy, echoed in the internal negotiations of the impersonator as he transformed into Mao.

Shot on a stash of old Chinese film uncovered in Beijing, Daoust physically manipulated the negatives in the darkroom to create a dreamy mood of memory and illusion. Each print is sealed in amber-like resin; the resulting portraits combine a 21st century handling of perspective with a visual timelessness, reflecting Daoust’s preoccupation with the borders between contemporary reality and an imagined past.

Exhibition Date: 5 May – 22 May 2011