Paradise Lost drawing and the grid of drawing installation that is based on photograph from a pre-revolutionary photograph in Iran and the title is from John Milton’s epic poetry of...
Paradise Lost drawing and the grid of drawing installation that is based on photograph from a pre-revolutionary photograph in Iran and the title is from John Milton’s epic poetry of the same name. Milton's poetry often overflows with political fervour and such antagonism that it can be read as a political allegory of his times. I saw that my life had many parallels with that of John Milton’s who lived through mid-seventeenth-century England with civil wars intermittently waged between Parliamentarians and Royalists. Milton and I, both lived through the fall of a monarch and the rise of a republic and witnessed great cultural and social turmoil. In 1649, King Charles I was executed for treason and for a decade England was ruled by a republican government that were extremely conservative. In Iran Mohammad Reza Shah was overthrown in 1979 dying of cancer in 1980. In reading Milton’s poems, Muhammad Reza Shah and King Charles I became the same character for me.
I was a child during the reign of the Shah and was brought up to believe him to be the “Father of the Nation”, alike to God. Under an autocratic rule the king and God are transposable. “He” becomes an all seeing all powerful being who controls and dictates lives. A King’s censorship can be likened to the idea of the “forbidden fruit”. Adam and Eve were banished from Eden at the moment of their altered state of consciousness, a restriction that made God appear as an authoritarian and perverse in Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost is a about the fall of Adam and Eve from their blissful state but also the fall of the rebel angel Satan after their failed revolt against God. The analogy is that what Man lost through banishment of Adam and Eve is what England lost through its overthrow of the utopian government for Milton. For me the title questions the viewer’s own response, since Iranians are divided in their political opinions my question is which version of the Paradise was lost for each individual. Was Paradise lost at the moment of a lost childhood, at the moment of leaving Iran forever to become an eternal émigré like Adam and Eve or was it at the moment of the overthrow of Mosaddegh — and what could have been or for others when the Shah of Iran was overthrown? Paradise can be different moments for each individual and the title opens a more collective question. The titles therefore open the narrative to the image allowing the viewer to unpack the meaning using their own experiences.
