Farideh Lashai (1944-2013), is a multidisciplinary visual artist, writer and translator, who wove personal history with expressive abstraction, lyricism and narrative. Born in Iran, Lashai studied German literature in Frankfurt and translated Bertold Brecht’s plays into Persian, before enrolling at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.  In her work as an artist, Lashai often drew from larger canons as well as her own experiences, such as brutal Iran-Iraq war (1980 – 1989). One of the last completed works before her death, When I count, there are only you… But when I look, there is only a shadow offers a response to Francisco Goya’s iconic The Disasters of War (1810-1820), a series of 82 prints detailing Spain’s conflict with France. In her reenvisioning, Lashai speaks to the cycles of violence sustaining our world. The title brings together two of the artist’s literary influences, combining quotes from Brecht and T.S. Elliot, while the projection is synched to Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne 21 in C minor. Through this poetic overlaying of expressive languages, Lashai bridges eras and geographies under the universal themes of suffering, shared trauma and war.

^{*Currently exhibited the Kunstmuseum Bonn}