Buildings of a Misremembered Past explores the relationship between place, memory, and displacement through fragmented landscapes and imagined interiors. Drawing on Gholami’s experience of geographical and cultural dislocation, the exhibition considers how places from the past can shift between familiarity and estrangement when recalled from a distance.

The works are informed in part by J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), particularly its exploration of the space between utopia and dystopia. This tension appears in paintings of Tehran’s Pearl Palace and its Western-style cinema theatres—buildings remembered through fragments, textures, and altered perspectives.

Across large canvases and smaller, more abstract works, architecture becomes less a record of a specific place than a vessel for memory. Layers of paint conceal and reveal parts of an uncertain narrative, allowing remembered and imagined spaces to overlap. The resulting environments exist somewhere between abstraction and form, reality and invention—a misremembered place shaped as much by distance and imagination as by what once existed.