Statement:

Mohammad Barrangi is an Iranian-born, UK-based artist working with print, murals, and sculpture. His practice draws from the aesthetics of Persian art and is informed by his lived experience of exile and disability. 

The Last Rain in Wonderland is an exhibition of new and existing works that merge themes of migration, travel, change and transformation, with a particular focus on the global climate crisis.///

Set in a bright and colourful space, the exhibition blurs Western and Eastern imagery. It features Barrangi’s reoccurring motifs of women and animals, often combining them to create dream-like, hybrid creatures.

Barrangi describes his practice as ‘living in a wonderland where anything is possible’, stating, ‘You do not need a passport to travel to my world, where I blur the boundaries between imagination and reality.’

Barrangi recently began working with pioneering 3D-printing technology to make sculptures of the magical characters found in his illustrations.

Zebras, elephants and bulls – inspired by Iranian iconography – frequent his work. In this exhibition, they are joined by a life-sized Iranian water buffalo emerging from a pool of sand.

Here, Barrangi spotlights the plight of these native animals (and the communities that rely on them for their livelihoods) as their homes in southern Iran are lost to climate change, drought and the indiscriminate drilling of oil wells.

As a counter to this bleak reality of forced migration and as a reminder that change is possible if we act now, painted scenes of luscious greenery, play and joy can be glimpsed through partially drawn curtains that adorn the gallery walls.

Furthermore, a life-sized ballerina – small in stature, aged and disabled – dances defiantly through the sand, symbolic of Barrangi’s interest in human survival, regardless of the forces we find ourselves against.