Sara Rahbar

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 2009

London, Saatchi Gallery, Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East, 2009

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully convey the various textures of the richly decorated surface apparent in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. All surface imperfections are original to the works exictuion and inherent to the artist's use of found materials in her work.
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At the age of five, artist Sara Rahbar was forced to flee with her family to America to escape the upheaval that followed in the wake of the Iranian revolution and preceded the Iran-Iraq war. Rahbars important series of Flags is directly informed by and in conversation with her resulting experience a divided childhood growing up between New York, London and Tehran. Composed of a myriad of fragmented Persian fabrics, trinkets and texts that the artist sews on the US flag, her assemblage work is as aesthetically beautiful and entrancing as it is politically dynamic and personally poignant. Flag #10 is a powerful example of Rahbar's Flag Series, the richly adorned surface of the work layered with themes of culture, war and trauma, her personal and shared memories patchworked together into an intricate discussion between the US and Iran, the individual and collective and the past and the present.

The use of any flag as the basis of a work is to start with a loaded plane blazoned with symbolism, and perhaps there is no greater juxtaposition than the American flag placed in intimate embroidered union with symbols of Iran. Rahbar's flags demand from her viewer an initial reaction, pulling at their sense of patriotism and goading underlying prejudice. However, simultaneously Rahbar's technique, her very act of creation, hints at a notion in direct opposition to antagonistic dissonance – one of hybridity, heterogeneity and community. Not only in America has the patchwork been a symbol of change, migration and multi-centric narratives welded together, but also internationally the patchwork has become the universal image of decentralization and the levelling of hierarchy.  Examined in this light, Rahbar's work loses its initial harsh affront, becoming instead a vehicle through with to understand the complicated configurations that have become our histories, nations and belief systems; her art an effort of mend a fractious history through the process ornamentation – an expression shared across the East/ West divide.