IN THE GALLERY: Archive of Longing

Ali Tahayori

4 Sep - 4 Oct 2025

THIS IS NO FANTASY is pleased to present Archive of Longing, a solo exhibition by Iranian-Australian artist Ali Tahayori.

Archive of Longing is a deeply personal search for love and belonging within an inherited family archive – a pursuit of fleeting “sparks of contingency” that often elude both the photographer’s intent and the subject’s awareness. In this body of work, Tahayori re-photographs, crops, enlarges, and prints archival family images onto glass. These are then fractured and reassembled into sculptural reliefs – fragmented yet intimate reconstructions of time, memory, and personal history.

By using glass rather than paper, Tahayori references 19th-century photographic methods such as wet plate negatives and daguerreotypes – prized for their clarity and reflectivity. As viewers move around the works, the images shift in visibility, evoking both the instability of memory and the fluidity of identity.

The reflective, shattered surfaces echo broken mirrors, returning the viewer’s gaze while reflecting on history through a queer diasporic lens—searching for glimpses of intimacy and desire within a turbulent socio-political context.

“In 2018, I inherited a series of family photographs from my mother. Even though I had seen these images as a child, I began to see them differently. The archive became personally significant, revealing aspects of my mother’s life before marriage, and collectively meaningful as a record of Iranian society before the 1979 revolution. Revisiting these images after thirty years, I began to uncover new possibilities, connections, and narratives that were absent from my mother’s original story. I started to tell my own story with – and through – them.” — Ali Tahayori

Join us and Ali in the gallery for an in conversation with Tahmina Maskinyar, Curator at Westspace, Melbourne on Saturday 06 September, 2 – 4pm