"Through A Glass, Darkly" features the works of three artists, Vilte Fuller, Farnaz Gholami and Naira Mushtaq, who make paintings that draw on, but deliberately mis-remember, nudge and alter photographic source material that purportedly speaks of cultural histories, memories and the 'authentic'. Each artist makes work from the diaspora, having been born in Lithuania (Fuller), Iran (Gholami) and Pakistan (Mushtaq).Each artist toys with the convention that drawing on photographic material pertaining to their countries of birth, gives access to an authentic cultural history. Photography, from archives through to family albums, figure importantly in the cultural memory of immigrants, and is often used to signal cultural authenticity, what has been lost or the persistence of cultural traditions in the diaspora. Moreover, it is often thought from a western viewpoint, to point to other cultural identities that are then assumed to be undifferentiated and uniform. This of course is a vapid assumption; Lithuanian, Iranian and Pakistani cultural identity are as internally varied and fractured as British identity with faultlines being anything from gender through to age, location in relation to urban centres, political orientation, sexuality and religion to name but a few major areas of internal contestation.///

 The work of these three artists points to the recognition of ambiguity and fragmentation within cultural identities.Vilte Fuller draws on found photographs and imagery from the internet to make paintings that on the one hand seem rooted in her Lithuanian cultural background but on the other form an entirely new and bizarre visual universe. Lithuanian food items morph into hybrid creatures or meld uneasily with glamorous yet resigned-looking figures. Events slowly seem to unfold or head towards imminent disaster. Fuller has even spoken about how her palette has been influenced by the colour of former KGB buildings in Lithuania. Cultural memory is presented as unevenly remembered, sometimes invented, sometimes conflictual, but generative of a new reality that whilst distinctly odd, is waiting to be negotiated by the diasporic subject.Farnaz Gholami's work meditates on the idea of cultural dislocation. Starting with photographs, mostly of now-deserted modernist buildings and locations in Tehran, Gholami creates ambiguous landscapes and interiors that are devoid of people, and have an almost ghostly quality. These are paintings of buildings that have become non-spaces, designed either by western modernist architects or Iranian architects trying to fuse traditional Persian architecture with the influence of western modernism, and then left to fall into disrepair. These were buildings that embody cultural ambiguity. Gholami's paintings speak of a nebulous and internally fragmented identity.