Payram. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

Bringing together works created using various silver-based techniques (Polaroids, baryta prints, solarized prints, collages...), the exhibition explores the notions of exile, refuge, and memory. Forced to leave Iran following the Islamic revolution, Payram has been developing a body of work since the mid-1980s in which photography becomes a means of questioning absence, transmission, and the intimate bonds that are built or transformed through the experience of exile.

Much ink has been spilled since Edward Said's reflections on exile. He taught us that the loss of the foundational place, of the ties constituting our origins, can represent both a weakness and a lack, as well as a new critical capacity regarding 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 center no longer see. While Edward Said is acerbic toward the tendency to present the exile as a romantic and cosmopolitan figure, he nonetheless acknowledges their ability to develop non-normative narratives or hybrid visions.

Much in Payram's work stems from his "Franco-Iranian" identity: two sides that, for the artist, are more like two fabrics floating one over the other in the wind than the two ends of an intercultural bridge, necessary as it may be (2). Certainly, Payram's exile and uprooting—having not returned to Iran since 1983, against his will—remain essential keys to understanding his work. A meticulous and patient oeuvre that takes its time, revealing itself little by little, without making noise or having an excessive desire for "visibility" or recognition.

This is even more true in the context of this exhibition at Galerie Maubert, which presents foundational works from the 1990s as well as previously unseen bodies of work from the 2000s. Payram is known for not rushing and for being a hermit photographer. Far from creating to exhibit, he keeps his prints carefully archived in boxes, sometimes for decades, before deciding to reveal them to the light of day. This fallowing of images leads him to distill his works in an anachronistic manner, through setbacks and surprises, rather than chronologically as in a catalogue raisonné. An approach that resonates particularly with the temporalities of latency or adjournment well known to the exile, for whom the experience of time proceeds more by spirals and survivals than by straight lines.