Catching the Moon Artist Book is the documentation of Farideh Lashai’s studies on her namesake video work, consisting of etchings, drawings and stills. It is the debut project of AB Bookness’s series of artist books.

Throughout her distinguished career spanning over five decades, Farideh Lashai always juggled with varying means of expression, without recognising any frontiers that might confine her to a rigidly defined identity. While painting and visual arts were her main practices, lyricism is the reigning characteristic in her works, whether it is painting, sculpture, writing, installation or a combination of animation, sculpture and painting.

With the use of animation projection Lashai divides the scene into temporal and spatial layers: they take various forms, imagined and real and spectacles are performed, humorous sarcastic stories are politicized, love stories, historical narratives unfold, then they fade away and the painting silent but charged remains. It is a way of discovering the meaning behind the background painting, a meaning that constantly changes, once abstract once representational, but nothing is represented, it is only the scene for performance of the theatrical.

The main concern in Lashai’s works is the interplay between the real and the imagined, which is visible in Catching the Moon in both its medium and subject. The material is solid stainless steel and flimsy, ephemeral video. The rabbit of her narrative sees his own reflection in a water well, then sees a moon and jumps to catch its reflection. Once caught, the moon and the rabbit become one, one speeding sparkle like a shooting star. In a way the work is a reflection on the fool hunting the shadow of a bird in Rumi’s poem. But Lashai’s work celebrates the fool. The fool is the rabbit, the artist who hunts the shadow, the dream, but a dream that affects and transforms reality and creates a reality of its own.

Farideh Lashai’s works can be found in major private and public collections such as the collections of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA); the Pompidou Center, Paris; Demenga Public Collection, Basel; Deutsche Bank and Commerz Bank, Germany; National Museum of Fine Arts, La Valetta; Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts; Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage; Dia Art Foundation, Delhi and The Farjam Collection, Dubai.

Each artist book in this limited edition of 50 consists of 10 aquatints on paper, 7 C-prints on metallic paper and 1 double-layered mixed media drawing.

Farideh Lashai Press Release