Bringing together works made using various silver-based photographic techniques (Polaroids, barite prints, solarised prints, collages…), the exhibition explores the notions of exile, refuge and memory. Forced to leave Iran following the Islamic Revolution, Payram has since the mid-1980s developed a body of work in which photography becomes a means of questioning absence, transmission and the intimate bonds that form or transform in the experience of exile.
Ink has flowed since reflections on exile by Edward Said. He taught us that the loss of the matrix place, of the bonds constituting our origins, can represent as much a weakness and a lack as a new critical capacity with regard to borders, nationalist thought and ultimately states. In other words, the marginal position often imposed on the exile allows them to see what those who camp at the centre no longer see. While Edward Said is scathing about the tendency to present the exile as a romantic, cosmopolitan figure, he nonetheless considers their capacity to develop non-normative narratives or hybrid visions.
Much in Payram's work stems from his "Franco-Iranian" identity: two sides that the artist sees as two canvases floating one over the other depending on the wind, rather than the two ends of an intercultural bridge, however necessary it may be (2). Certainly, Payram's exile and uprooting – he has not returned to Iran since 1983, against his will – remain essential keys to understanding his work. A meticulous and patient body of work that takes its time, unveiling itself little by little, without making a noise and without excessive desire for "visibility" or recognition.
This is even more true in the context of the present exhibition at Galerie Maubert, which presents foundational works from the 1990s alongside unpublished series from the 2000s. Payram is known for not rushing and for being a hermit photographer. Far from creating in order to exhibit, he keeps his prints carefully archived in boxes, sometimes for decades, before resigning himself to revealing them to the light of day. This fallow period of the images leads him to distil his works in an anachronistic way, out of step and by surprise, rather than chronologically as in a catalogue raisonné. An approach that resonates particularly with the temporalities of latency or postponement well known to the exile, for whom the experience of time proceeds more by spirals and survivals than by straight lines.