Fading Fables (Zar-Afshun)

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Photo courtesy of the Gallery of St. Albert

Naghmeh Sharifi, "Still from Fading Fables (Zar-Afshun)," 2024, digital video and sound installation.

Opening in the Vault Exhibition Space in the Art Gallery of St. Albert on June 24 is Fading Fables (Zar-Afshun). It is an audio-visual installation inspired by an old Iranian fairytale Naghmeh Sharifi’s grandmother would narrate to her and her siblings as a bedtime story during the Iran-Iraq War.

This tradition of oral storytelling has been one of the sole means of passing down old fairytales and fables from one generation to the next. With this project that couples Nagmeh’s late grandmother’s narration with her animated illustrations, she highlights the role women have played in preserving oral storytelling traditions while creating the representation her generation of women lacked in post-revolutionary Iran.

As a child growing up in Iran in the early 1980s, Naghmeh lived with her parents and grandmother. During the Iran-Iraq war, her grandmother would tell her stories at bedtime that had only ever been shared out loud. Zar-Afshun was a favorite, an old Iranian folktale that her grandmother had learned when she was a child.

As an adult, Naghmeh recorded her beloved elderly grandmother telling the story one last time shortly before her passing. In the exhibition, her grandmother’s recorded voice sets the pace of the story, with the visuals capturing the action of drawing and erasing, as if the story is being created in real time. Projected across multiple pieces of gauzy fabric, the characters of the story shift and change, morphing as the story progresses.

Fading Fables runs until August 23.