LAST CHANCE Anahita Razmi: The Task of the Mythologist

Anahita Razmi’s video, installation and performance works usually focus on issues of identity and gender and examine processes of cultural appropriation in which the meanings of existing images, artefacts and thus identities are put into question by situating them in another context. Her sixth solo exhibition at the gallery references Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957), a seminal work on the subject that examines how culture turns mundane objects and practices into myths that convey ideological meanings; Razmi builds on this premise to find global power structures embedded in our material and virtual; for her, symbols such as the fingers-crossed emoji, a Turkish talismanic shirt, or a 90s Britpop emblem hold unstable meanings, shifting with context and use. The act of deconstructing these layered meanings is what Barthes describes as “the task of the mythologist.”

For Razmi’s ongoing Talismanic Polarities series (2021–present), unique Islamic talismanic shirts are pinned with buttons reading YES, BUT, NO and AND; “by foregrounding these semantic framing devices, Razmi incorporates tools of interpretation into a renewed reading of an object that sustains multiple and even conflicting possibilities” says the gallery.

A new work, OA SIS (2025) features Oasis band T-shirts with evil eye appliqués covering the OA so that only SIS remains:  a signifier of Western masculinity revised into one of Eastern femininity or a comment on the commercialisation of feminism? Or both? Or more?