Growing Brighter Futures (Diptych) - Limited Edition of 3 Photograph

The work is a Museum Mount piece on 6 inch Sintra and Matte heavy gram paper. It has Wood brace behind it which makes if very easy to install. Sharifzadeh interrogates the concept of the European Renaissance as an isolated phenomenon, rather than a period in organic conversation with movements that had started earlier in the Middle East. Sharifzadeh explores the impact of the broader Mediterranean culture and ideas that helped spark and inform Europe’s rebirth, juxtaposed against the present-day collisions of culture, by placing her own body as a contemporary woman from the Middle East within the imagery, iconography, and physical geography of the Italian Renaissance. Too often, art historians have placed European arts in a position of privilege, exorcising and minimizing arts from other regions. Through this re- contextualization and reclamation, she aims to challenge the very idea of European and Middle Eastern otherness.