Through a Glass, Darkly brought together the work of Vilte Fuller, Farnaz Gholami and Naira Mushtaq, three artists whose paintings draw on photographic sources while deliberately misremembering, altering and disrupting them. Born in Lithuania, Ireland and Pakistan respectively, the artists approach images connected to their cultural backgrounds through different experiences of place, migration and diaspora.

Gholami was born in Ireland and grew up in Iran, and her work is shaped by an ongoing relationship with places that are remembered, imagined and encountered from a distance. Her paintings draw on fragments of photographic imagery and visual references connected to Iran, but resist the idea that such images can offer a stable or authentic representation of a place or culture. Instead, familiar architectural forms, landscapes and interiors become partially obscured, altered or transformed through layers of paint, creating spaces that exist somewhere between memory and imagination.

For Gholami, the photographic image functions less as evidence than as a point of departure. Its apparent authority is unsettled through the process of painting, allowing memory to become fragmented, unreliable and subjective. The resulting spaces are neither straightforward representations of Iran nor purely imagined environments, but shifting constructions shaped by distance, personal experience and the passage of time.

This approach reflects the wider concerns of the exhibition, which questions the assumption that photographic material connected to a country of origin can provide direct access to an authentic cultural history. Photography can carry particular significance within diasporic experience, preserving traces of places left behind while also becoming a way of imagining what has been lost or transformed. Yet cultural identities are never fixed or uniform. They are internally fragmented and shaped by histories, politics, geography, personal experience and individual memory.

Through their different approaches to painting, Fuller, Gholami and Mushtaq acknowledge this instability, challenging fixed ideas of cultural identity and national belonging. Rather than reinforcing clear borders between places and identities, their works occupy an uncertain space in which memory, image and cultural history remain open to reinterpretation.

Through a Glass, Darkly
Niru Ratnam, London
7–30 July 2022