Statement:

Nazanin Noroozi: False Dawn explores the contending forces of home and displacement, as well as travel and migration.

The title of both the exhibition and the artworks, False Dawn – fajr’e kâzeb in Persian – refers to a natural phenomenon called zodiacal light, a cast of unearthly light appearing on the horizon that anticipates the sun’s rising or trails behind its setting.

In the right conditions, it is observable just before dawn and after dusk. Noroozi is captivated by “this transitional moment, suspended between night and day, darkness and light.” Further, for her, it embodies the “uncertain space between departure and arrival.”

At the heart of the exhibition is the video False Dawn, 2025, that intersperses media coverage and coast guard footage of the ongoing refugee crisis along southern European shores with clips of hand-painted Super 8 family films and found, mid-20th-century images taken by American tourists.///

The images of overcrowded migrant boats and stranded individuals, which were initially circulated through the news media, are altered and re-contextualized.

Noroozi’s use of these news clips highlights the experiences of some of the approximately 123.2 million refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced persons.

The clips incorporated from home videos were taken in Iran before the Revolution in 1979, in which women in her family are joyfully celebrating and swimming.

These moving images are interspersed with pictures of scenic landscapes captured by American tourists. Noroozi uses water as a symbolic visual motif to unite these distant places.

The exhibition also includes numerous large-scale works on handmade paper, screenprinted with stills from the video.

Noroozi developed a highly experimental process of layering screenprinting and wet-hand papermaking at the renowned papermaking studio Dieu Donné in Brooklyn, NY.

This technique allows her to transfer photographic images onto paper as she makes it, resulting in richly pigmented colors and highly tactile surfaces.