Opening Reception Thursday 16 January 6 – 8pm

Crawford Art Gallery is delighted to present work by Hassan Hajjaj and Nassiem Valamanesh as part of its ongoing screening series by Irish and international artists. In a new departure, Crawford Art Gallery has invited Rose Issa, a leading expert on contemporary visual art and film from the Arab world and Iran to curate the exhibition. Both Hassan Hajjaj and Nassiem Valamanesh’s work explore the interface of living in and between merging cultures paradoxically highlighting alienation and embracing the differences.

In the film Distant Words continues Nassiem Valamanesh’s engagement with themes of longing and loneliness, not for a loved one or a place but for the ability to communicate and speak one’s mind. Valamanesh’s film combines animation, text and photography in which the artist conveys his isolation and frustration in his inability to speak the language when travelling through his father’s country, Iran. Valamanesh’s film references the loss of language with a seemingly un-­‐diagnosable medical condition and the gloomy existence of living between cultures.