Maryam Jamalian an Iranian woman had a stark image of her sister in Muslim dress on a roof top with the view of sprawling Tehran in the background. The image speaks to the viewer about the restrictions put on women in Iran alongside the limitations on freedom of speech and the use of rooftops as a means to pass information otherwise prohibited.
Yuri Gomi a young Japanese woman used old photographs of her great grandmother visiting well known tourist spots across Europe in the mid 1960's as the starting point for her work. She retraced her ancestor's footsteps recreating these images in the present day. The series reflects the change in attitudes to travel and dress in 4 decades alongside the link to family history.
|Part of a series by Yuri Gomi|
The work that spoke the most about identity and family history in the exhibition though was by the American Anita Grosz who lives in Wokingham. Her work uses the letters of a young Jewish Czech boy and his British 'sponsor' during the flight from Nazi Europe. "These letters illustrate the struggle for identity while coping with the consequences of involuntary displacement". She sought out the English addresses of the sponsor's letters to the young boy photographing the front doors of those places today. That young Czech boy who came to live in England in 1939 escaping the fate that befell his family and the countless Jews across Europe was Anita's father.
|Letters from Lilian - Doorways (detail) by Anita Grosz|