Parinaz Eleish Gharagozlou: Beyond the Seas There is a City

You walk down alleyways and dead-ends. You circle the squares and roundabouts of your memory.
You recognize the feel of the summer heat on your skin.
That is yours for ever.
Passing by an open window, you know the smell of the mid day meal cooking on a stove.
You are sure the fried onions would have a sweet taste on your tongue if you were called in to share the repast. You should be in sync with the city’s pulse, this beating heart that you sense against the soul of your shoes. And yet.
And yet you see it cracking, crumbling, crashing.
For years now, for a long time. It is soundless, slow, steady. You are walking down narrow lanes, tree lined avenues and around street corners, all renamed reshaped.
Where there was a door there is gaping hole. Where there were windows, blind darkness within an empty frame. A three legged chair abandoned to its fate, a stuffed bear for the alley cats.
Cities no longer in control of their past or their destiny, abandoned to the pillage of the greedy, of the small limited minds.
You walk down narrow lanes and pass by filigreed garden gates. You look for stories, memories contained within the walled ruins that were home to all that. And so much more than that. The heart and soul of the city.
And yet.
You find a city without borders a city with no past, no future. And you remember having read this:

"If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too.” - Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

-Parinaz Eleish Gharagozlou

Dubai, UAE – Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to announce artist Parinaz Eleish Gharagozlou’s solo show ‘Beyond the Seas there is a City’ opening on 19th September 2022.

The series is about history and it’s relation to our future. When a society’s link to the past is severed, it promises a rootless lot. With the systematic destruction of the familiar stories of a people, we will have no evidence and no memory to propel us toward a sane future. Eleish’s works may provoke strong emotions of nostalgia in the viewer but it is not backward-looking. The goal of these works is to alert the viewer that, as a society, we need to be mindful of what has been handed down to us and preserve it for the next generation. Preservation of the past is an investment in the future.