B.1959 Mashhad, Iran

Born in Mashhad, a sacred shrine city in Iran, Pouran Jinchi (B.1959) became attuned early in life to the way architecture, objects, decoration, and the written word can be imbued with symbolic power. This awareness is threaded throughout her body of work, which explores the dense intersectionality of literary and pictorial narratives. Her mixed-media artworks for the exhibition, by way of inventorising the visual apparatuses of military power, brings to the fore the discreet but yet pervasive ways in which they seep into culture. Here, her works are suggestive of the attention that we should deploy amidst the mechanics of the subdued and subtle, attuned to the exhibition’s reminder of the power of symbols and metaphors.