Imaginary Homeland

Gallery Under The Mango Tree is honored to present the exhibition “Imaginary Homeland” by Pegah Keshmirshekan (*1996, Tehran) from April 19th – June 14th 2024. After graduating from Berlin’s Universität der Künste in 2023 as recipient of the Schulz-Stübner Prize for painting, this will be her first solo gallery show in Berlin.

On display is an expansion of her conceptual multimedia series of floral still lifes. Her acrylic paintings, an intriguing pastiche of the 17th century motif of the “Impossible Bouquet”, are paired with a dialogic short film as well as an installation that immerses viewers into the narrative fiction that spans the exhibition.

The Impossible Bouquets painted by the Dutch Masters for the western european bourgeoisie feature exotic flower arrangements; impossible as these could never truly coexist in a vase due to the flowers’ diverse geographical and seasonal origins. Pegah’s bouquets center around the iconographic “crown imperial” – a flower native to the mountainous region stretching from Turkey to the Himalayan foothills. Through the flower, which comes to symbolize a distant and imaginary homeland, the viewer is invited to explore the topics of hybrid identity and diasporic experience.

Viewers are pulled into the front room of the gallery by a backdrop of deep-blue walls and yellow bars. In this first space a fictional short film intoduces them to Roya, a london-born painter and bus driver with Iranian heritage. Through her character, playing the role of the artist of the impossible bouquets, the viewer learns about the dissonance between diasporic imaginary and reality.

In the central room of the gallery, visitors are engulfed in further interpretations of the still life, ranging from a front and verso diptych to isolated deconstructions and a contemporary reinterpretation of the bouquet. The painted works are accompanied by selected film stills oscillating between the urban context of London and the natural hillscapes of Iran, adding interpretative tension to the circumstances under which the floral arrangements were produced historically and today.

Pegah Keshmirshekan is a promising artist, who displays conceptual depth and masterful technique in her oeuvre of painting, film and photography. She has studied fine arts at UdK, Berlin and Central St. Martins, in London. Her work has been displayed in several group exhibitions in Berlin, London, and Tehran.