An epic work by the late Iranian artist Farideh Lashai, inspired by Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War series (1810-20), will be the centrepiece of a major exhibition at the British Museum in London in 2018, after being shown alongside the Spanish artist’s work in Madrid, as well as in Ghent in Belgium. The museum acquired the work—the first piece of digital art to be bought as part of its growing collection of works by Middle Eastern artists—in 2015. The work, entitled When I Count, There Are Only You… but When I Look, There is Only a Shadow (2013), combines digital elements and 80 original photo-intaglio prints. In a video element, figures removed from the prints reappear in a projection. Venetia Porter, the assistant keeper and curator of Islamic and contemporary Middle East at the British Museum, says that Lashai scanned Goya’s Disasters of War from a collection in Boston in 2010.
“The scanned images were digitally manipulated to take all the human and animal figures out. The digital files were printed on transparent film to produce a very fine digital print, which included all the details and grey tones,” Porter says.
“All the figures in Goya’s prints were animated and placed within three layers of video on each other. In the finished result, as a spotlight bounces from one print to another, various parts of the animation briefly appear and disappear.”
The work is due to go on show at the Prado in June 2017. A spokeswoman for the museum says that it will be displayed in the ground-floor galleries of the Villanueva building, alongside Goya’s masterpieces, such as Pinturas Negras (the black paintings) (1819-23).
Lashai's work will also go on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, in early 2017. “It seems timely to place the work of Lashai alongside the work of Goya, as both these artists have, in different eras, witnessed suppression and chronicled conflict in their countries,” says a spokeswoman for the Ghent museum, which last year acquired a set of Goya’s Disasters of War.