Raha Rastifard is a conceptual artist who frequently explores themes of identity and cultural heritage. Her work often incorporates references to literature, philosophy, and art history. This new body of work reflects her ongoing exploration of cultural heritage, drawing from personal experience while addressing broader questions of cultural continuity, displacement, and loss. At the core of Rastifard’s practice is an interest in how cultural heritage shapes our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world around us.
Her latest works draw inspiration from the architectural and ornamental traditions of Persian culture. Geometric structures, abstract forms, and references to monumental architecture serve not only as aesthetic elements, but also as carriers of memory—reimagined, reinterpreted, and sometimes lost over time.
Like memory itself, Rastifard's works are fragmentary, layered, and pieced together from various sources—both real and imagined. At first glance, they may evoke images of archaeological artifacts, museum objects, or miniature landmarks. Yet the sculptures are neither historical remnants nor replicas. By navigating this visual terrain, Rastifard raises questions about authenticity and value, while also pointing to the forces that shape and reshape cultural memory.
Raha Rastifard's first solo exhibition at Berg Gallery presents a series of colorful works in 3D lens technology that challenge the viewer's gaze by creating displacements of the subject. Lenticular printing is a multi-step process commonly used to create an animated effect, a sense of three-dimensionality or to give depth to the image. For Rastifard, the method becomes a way of realizing the many layers that together make up her illusory pictorial worlds. As so often in Rastifard's practice, there is a kinship between the several thousand-year-old Persian traditions of abstract geometric patterns and the works in this exhibition.
Rastifard uses original works in the form of paintings, graphics and photographs to create her technologically advanced worlds of images, where these originals are intertwined into a whole. Like the traditional Persian geometric patterns, the motifs repeat, overlap and coincide with each other. Her work is characterized by precision and a deep interest in the various optical phenomena that characterize her abstract landscape. In this way, her focus is reminiscent of the scientist's; there is a fundamental interest in the many ways in which light is reflected, refracted and bent. At the same time, her process is equally emotional, philosophical and internal – introspection and a meditative approach serve as key words in the creative process.
Installation photos: Jean-Baptiste Béranger.
