Editor’s Note

Gohar Dashti was born in Iran in 1980, a year after the Iranian Revolution and the beginning of the war between Iran and Iraq. The Today’s Life and War series reflects her experiences growing up in Ahvaz, near her father’s hometown, on the border between Iran and Iraq during the war. The war was a normal part of her childhood. She recounts rushing with her brothers to collect bullet shells from the rooftop as soon as the “all-clear” siren went off (Higson 2015). Dashti’s photographs in this series revisit these moments of living with war and their enduring effects on a society. She elaborately sets up an unsmiling couple, a sister and brother in life, who often stare at the spectator in surrealist scenes in the desert. The man and woman appear to go about their daily lives in a barren landscape littered with remnants of war: tanks, helmets, or, as in this picture, a barricade of sandbags. The art may solicit an initial chuckle from the spectator given the absurdity of the scene. But ultimately the work compels the grave realization of the subtle yet pervasive presence of violence and loss. Dashti’s photographs playfully challenge borders and bordering: between Iran and Iraq, the normal and exceptional, the domestic and geopolitical, and fiction and reality. She challenges us to reconsider our many borders and learn how to dwell in spaces of violence and hope, of tragedy and perseverance.—Banu Gökarıksel