Payram. Que vos pas soient légers car vous marchez sur mes rêves

The ink has flowed since the reflections on the exile of Edward Saïd. He taught us that the loss of the matrix space, of the links that make up our origins, can represent both a weakness and a lack as well as a new critical capacity vis-à-vis borders, nationalist thought and ultimately states. In other words, the position of margin often imposed on the exile allows him to see what is no longer seen by those who camp in the center. Si Edward Saïdis acerbic against the tendency to present the exile as a romantic and cosmopolitan figure, he does not consider less his ability to develop non-normative narratives or hybrid visions.

Many things in Payram’s work stem from his “Franco-Iranian” identity: two sides that are more like two paintings floating on top of each other depending on the wind, than the two ends of an intercultural bridge, however necessary it may be (2). Certainly, the exile and uprooting of Payram – who has not returned to Iran since 1983, against his will – remain essential reading keys to understand his work. A meticulous and patient work that takes its time, that unfolds little by little, without shouting noise and without excessive desire for “visibility” or recognition.

This is even more true in the context of the present exhibition at the Galerie Maubert, which presents founding works from the 1990 years, as well as unpublished corpuses from the 2000 years. Payram is known for not rushing and for being a hermit photographer. Far from creating to exhibit, he keeps his proofs carefully archived in boxes, sometimes decades, before resolving to reveal them in the open. This set-aside of the images leads him to distill his works anachronistically, against time and surprises, rather than chronologically as in a catalogue raisonné. An approach that particularly resonates with the well-known latency or postponement temporalities of the exile, for whom the experience of time proceeds more by spirals and survivals than by straight lines.