ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

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A family’s story begins long before those who will tell it are born. It is built through memories and experiences passed down in stories that, heard time and again, become as vivid as experiences of our own. This shared knowledge forms a family mythology, sustained by stories, customs, places and the people who preserve it from one generation to the next.

 

In families shaped by migration, these stories become a way of getting to know the country of origin: a place to which one belongs, in part, through the experiences of others, their nostalgia and their affections. For the children of migrants, the experience of the place where they grow up intertwines with that inherited memory and transforms it. From this process, an identity of their own emerges, shaped by diverse cultural references, some closely aligned and others more difficult to reconcile.

 

Born in Sweden to Iranian parents, Sofia Pashaei grounds her practice in this sense of multiple belonging. This cultural experience runs through her visual language and informs her interest in memory, nostalgia and family relationships. In As My Mother’s Daughter, Sofia Pashaei draws on painting, poetry and drawing to reflect on the process of starting a family outside one’s country of origin, and on the ways cultural belonging takes shape and evolves through these past and present bonds. Pashaei thus turns her gaze towards a time before her own existence.

 

In her visual language, the geometry and flattened perspectives of Middle Eastern art, particularly Iranian Qajar portraiture, coexist with elements of Scandinavian modernism.  

The sculptural bodies convey restrained gestures that contrast with the intensity of the experiences depicted: the beginning of a love story, pregnancy, childbirth and caring for a daughter… This restraint preserves a degree of reserve even in the most emotional scenes and connects with the self-awareness that runs through Pashaei’s practice. As the artist explains, living between cultures can heighten one’s attention to one’s own behaviour and how others perceive it. The controlled poses of her figures reflect this awareness of the gaze of others and evoke the effort involved in building a life in a place where one does not yet belong.

 

Her work as an animation director brings an additional dimension: an attention to posture, framing and gesture is evident in every image. The sequential drawings shift the focus towards more symbolic elements, allowing meaning to emerge in the intervals between images as well.

 

The paintings explore the relationship between a mother and a father, the anticipation of a daughter’s birth and the transformations that accompany her arrival. The parents’ hands shelter a bird representing the daughter yet to be born; the composition of the childbirth scene recalls a funerary scene; and nature offers a sense of continuity in the face of the instability of family and social structures.

 

The poem and drawings introduce the perspective of the daughter, still unborn in the scenes depicted in the paintings. Through her voice, the family story also becomes an exploration of her own origins. The fragmented sequences reveal how the past is always relived through a personal lens. As My Mother’s Daughter reconsiders identity through this process of transmission and interpretation: to recognise ourselves in those who came before us is to find a position of our own from which to tell the family mythology that defines us.

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Text by Manuela Medina