Through A Glass, Darkly' features the works of three artists, Vilte Fuller, Farnaz Gholami and Naira Mushtaq, who make paintings that draw on, but deliberately mis-remember, nudge and alter photographic source material that purportedly speaks of cultural histories, memories and the 'authentic'. Each artist makes work from the diaspora, having been born in Lithuania (Fuller), Iran (Gholami) and Pakistan (Mushtaq).
Each artist toys with the convention that drawing on photographic material pertaining to their countries of birth, gives access to an authentic cultural history. Photography, from archives through to family albums, figure importantly in the cultural memory of immigrants, and is often used to signal cultural authenticity, what has been lost or the persistence of cultural traditions in the diaspora. Moreover, it is often thought from a western viewpoint, to point to other cultural identities that are then assumed to be undifferentiated and uniform. This of course is a vapid assumption; Lithuanian, Iranian and Pakistani cultural identity are as internally varied and fractured as British identity with faultlines being anything from gender through to age, location in relation to urban centres, political orientation, sexuality and religion to name but a few major areas of internal contestation. The work of these three artists points to the recognition of ambiguity and fragmentation within cultural identities.
Irit Rogoff, argues in her book 'Terra Infirma: Geography's Visual Culture' that "a persistent belief in immutable borders" arises because of the belief that there should be strictly policed lines between different national communities. This assumes "some cohesion on each side of the border." What happens then when internally fragmented communities are accepted as the reality of the situation instead? And what of borders? "How can they remain strict and absolute lines of control," asks Rogoff, "When they are separating tentative and nebulous and incoherent identities?"