The Harbinger of a Sweet Song

The Harbinger of a Sweet Song brought together the work of Farnaz Gholami and Alexandra Searle at Yamamoto Keiko Gallery, exploring anticipation, uncertainty and the possibility of renewal in the aftermath of a period of profound disruption.

Gholami’s paintings move through states of absence and expectation. Drawing on found imagery, family photographs, magazine images and fragments of stories, she constructs imagined landscapes and interiors that feel at once unfamiliar and strangely remembered. Her paintings hold a sense of melancholy without becoming fixed in it. Spaces appear suspended, as though something has just happened or is about to happen, leaving room for anticipation and the possibility of what lies beyond the visible.

In these works, Gholami is interested in the psychological experience of place and in the ways memory and imagination continually reshape it. Familiar visual fragments become unsettled and transformed, creating spaces that hover between reality and invention, presence and absence.

The exhibition paired these paintings with Alexandra Searle’s sculptures, whose strange balances and unexpected forms introduced a different kind of tension and possibility. Together, the works considered how uncertainty can contain not only unease, but also curiosity, imagination and the promise of something yet to come.

The Harbinger of a Sweet Song was held at Yamamoto Keiko Gallery, London, from 26th June – 31st July 2021.