
Half-Light
- Publisher
- Gnomic Book
- Year
- 2019
- Specifications
- Softcover
Limited edition of 300
Bilingual project: Farsi and English
Pages of varying opacities evoking the fragility of skin
Readable in opposite directions in each language
At the time she made this book, Shahrzad Darafsheh was a thirty-six-year-old artist battling cancer in Tehran. This complex book, in a limited edition of three hundred, is a window into her life and experience. It operates on several levels: as a chronicle of her journey through a sickness, an object made of various materials of different opacities evoking the fragility of skin, obscuring and revealing life's scars; and as an experiment in storytelling—when read in Farsi, from right to left, the result is very different from that which an English reader will experience: it is a two-language project that provides a view into life in a country which many of us have no knowledge of, or visibility into. The book sits at the intersection of artist's book, memoir and atlas, and is among the most innovative photobook objects to come from contemporary Iran in recent years.