Laila Tara H
2002
20 June - 19 July 2024
Private View: 19th June, 6.30 - 8.30pm
‘We exit our homes and come to face the uncontrollable. We exist, outside of the home, in spaces that challenge our autonomy and sense of control. We are put head-to-head with life. In times of comfort, this itself adds to the softness. It is a content submission, a case of a good political parent. In times of discomfort, it is an invasion. A parent removing the lock on your door.’ LTH
For her solo exhibition at Cooke Latham Laila Tara H has created a haunting installation in which the viewer is invited to move through a ‘day’ as they navigate the walls of the gallery. Although never clearly delineated, domestic and public space is alluded to throughout the installation, while the works themselves occupy the ‘liminal space of that doorframe’ between the two.
On one wall hangs a large painting, hung in segments. A dissected bed, the work encapsulates the intimacy of cohabitation while also alluding to the rituals and confines of our daily routines. The paper is peppered with the traditional miniature painting for which Tara H is renowned; exquisite lobster claws, conjoined faces and hybrid carnations/poppies. Building upon the visual lexicon she has developed over the last few years each repeated motif is imbued with its own meaning, an alphabet of domestic comfort and claustrophobia, of luxury and death. Of Iranian descent, London based, with a peripatetic childhood, Tara H’s paintings allude to her own, personal, history. Yet they are also, by virtue, universal. This is a bed, anyone’s bed, splayed upon the wall. Its ‘hands’ are cow bells, its ‘feet’ casts of washing up gloves. The tyranny of domestic chores is rendered concrete, our cow like submission to routine playfully laid bare.
On an adjacent wall the viewer has ‘exited the house’. Here the works displayed allude to public space. An intricate painting depicts an abstract burger, a nod to the McDonalds peace theory, the idea that McDonalds countries do not go to war; that a burger is a sign of safety. It conversely also operates as a Western cultural cue, a symbol of cultural hijack and the erosion of cultural heritage. Nearby are hung two small mirrors. The minute brushwork of Tara H’s painting requires such close interrogation that the mirrors are jarring, an invitation to view oneself with the same intense concentration. In Iran the two portraits of Khomeini and Khamanei must be placed in every public space. Tara H inverts this, inviting a self-interrogation of our own agency and that of the regimes we exist within or bolster.
In the centre of the gallery hangs a single salt shaker pouring salt onto a sapele wooden plinth, shaped like a ubiquitous Iranian townhouse. The work references the widely held and cross-cultural superstition that spilling salt is bad luck and that to throw it over one’s shoulder is to avert misfortune. Centrally displayed within the gallery the shaker becomes a domestic hourglass marking time and superstition. An embodiment of luck, or our desire for it.
The pile of salt is mirrored in the final wall of the gallery in which the viewer ‘returns’ to the domestic space. Two exquisitely painted large works are hung together in a crescendo of imagery. The two sides represent the two faces of conflicted daily life. One painting depicts the repeated motif of the tulip, immaculate (but weather-beaten), representing escapism and the palatable presenting of a contained self. In the other painting Tara H’s eponymous ‘women’ march across the paper interspersed with flames while an unrestrained anger permeates throughout. Seen together there is a phoenix like quality to the paintings. An idea of these two sides existing in an eternal, uneasy, co-existence.
Mirroring our contemporary human experience, in which the political and social landscape permeates our domestic space via technology, the exhibition exists in an uneasy hinterland between public and private. The work is both an interrogation of how we present ourselves within these two arenas and the surveillance we are all, to some degree, subject to. Both from outside and within.
