Lot 33: Mehdi Karampour (born 1976) The Last Excuse

Mehdi Karampour (born 1976)
The Last Excuse, 2012Archival pigment print, flush-mounted, signed, titled, dated and numbered '1/5' in ink on the flush-mount verso.image/ flush-mount 26 x 39 3/8in (66 x 97.5cm)

The second, thought-provoking photograph by Karampour is from his series of ten photographs Nine Nights and One Day, based on Farsi love poems by ancient and contemporary Persian poets such as Rumi, Hafiz and Kasrai, each illustrating the evoloution of Iranian culture over time. These "tableaux vivants", lit atmospherically as if for a movie, have a recurring motif-the room in which the image is set and the clock without hands appears in all ten works. They were part of an old house, located in the heart of Tehran, that was demolished after the project was completed to make room for a new tower block.