In an epoch where immigration is becoming increasingly contested and identity is in flux, London’s Paper Mache Tiger showroom presents Stamps of a Revolution, a solo exhibition by artist Ali Mobasser, exploring the diasporic narrative of Iranian people following the country’s 1978-1979 Revolution.

Mobasser’s childhood was marked by movement, uprooted from his native Iran in the midst of the Revolution due to his grandfather’s role in the Shah’s Government, he collected stamps until the age of twelve. This stamp collection became Mobasser’s sole connection to the region he was becoming increasingly estranged from and now forms the basis of the artist’s latest exhibition.

The movement of the stamps is reflective of Mobasser’s personal journey, of distance and reconnection. The stamps were printed in Iran before being sent to America, and then travelling to London as part of Mobasser’s cherished collection. Thirty years later, the stamps were photographed in the UK and then finally taken back to Iran to be re-printed and framed for an exhibition in collaboration with Tehran’s Ag Galerie. Paper Mache Tiger contributes to this nostalgic voyage, exhibiting the series in London this September, the city Mobasser refers to as home.

Darcie Imbert: Stamps of a Revolution reflects the evolution of your identity, can you tell us more about how your personal stamp collection developed into the series it is today?
Ali Mobasser: I was a child living in America when the revolution happened. My parents and I moved all over the place and my mother and I separated from my father when we settled in America. My mother’s side of the family are hoarders so there was always stuff around. My granny would sit there cutting the coupons out of newspapers and I thought it looked fun so when the post came I started cutting out the stamps I thought looked cool. My granny showed me how to soak them in hot water and peel them, and that’s how it started, when I was around seven.

My mother sent me on holiday to London to see my dad who was living in Putney, so I took my stamps with me and carried on collecting until I was twelve. For me, the stamp collection was my sole connection to Iran, despite conversing in Farsi, it felt like we were constantly in transit, moving from one place to the next. Aside from the stamps, my only connection to Iran was the alienating news footage of people demonstrating and other scary things on TV.

Later on, when I went to art college, I tried to find this ‘voice’ which typically takes a long time to uncover, this search led me back to the stamps to help narrate my diasporic identity and displacement. I photographed the stamps and titled the series Stamps of a Revolution, which I thought was representative of myself and what the stamps are.

The stamps were discovered by Ag Gallery, Tehran, where I first showed the series. Originally, I hadn’t planned on returning to Iran but when my dad died I felt it important to reconnect with this element of my past.  So, it goes full circle. The stamps that connected me to Iran for such a long time were the reason I ended up going back.

The work is symbolic of the diasporic narrative of Iranian’s after the revolution. Time creates a new identity; the stamps were printed and sent from Iran, collected in America, then thirty years later they were photographed in the UK, sent back to be printed in Iran, before then returning to London to be shown with Paper Mache Tiger. The whole process is quite beautiful.

DI: In what ways did your identity feel conflicted by your return to Iran?
AM: Returning to Iran, I felt like a foreigner. We were outside a bazaar and these kids were saying in Farsi, “Who is that foreign kid?” I was thinking, “How do they know I am foreign?” It was because I was wearing white trainers and no one else was, they were all wearing shoes. The thing is, if I saw an Iranian guy who came straight out of Iran, I would notice him in London as well. I am not one of those people who has suddenly found their motherland and battles a persistent urge to reconnect. If anything, it made me feel like a true Londoner, which is what I call myself. I don’t call myself British as I am not British, I am an Iranian Londoner. I’ve always been Iranian but I have all these different passports which don’t really mean anything.

DI: How did your familial situation influence your sense of identity, especially in relation to Iran?
AM: My father was a journalist who worked for the National Movement of Iranian Resistance, an anti-regime organisation. It was quite strange trying to be normal at school and being asked, “What does your Dad do?” and replying, “I don’t want to talk about it.” It was all very political. He used to translate books from English to Farsi to make money and eventually he got a job as a journalist at the BBC. I was in my teens while he was doing that but he was never really there. He was living as a functioning alcoholic which kept him disengaged as a father. My aunt was the one who stepped in as a mother figure and I made a lot of work about her. When she died in 2013, the same year my son turned one, it was as if my mum died. My aunt was the person who had given me this sense of identity, but she was gone.

My son was born with a father who has this mixed-up idea of what his identity is and so has his mother, who was brought up in Paris with separated parents and an alcoholic father. She had really unsettled high school years in Germany where she also felt like she didn’t belong.

I thought I need to know, we need to know, who we are, so we can teach our son who he is, which is a really broad way of looking at it. That is why I started making work about family, a narrative exploring what made us who we are.

DI: Your upbringing is marked by transience, perpetual movement and change, Stamps of a Revolution seems to revisit this period from a position of self-assurance. You mention your son as a source of inspiration, how does your personal experience inform the relationship you have with your son and his connection to his own identity?
AM: I think the word identity is quite misleading. It’s like the word ‘art’; what is it, what does it mean? I think what happened, specifically with my story, is that people move out of their country for a reason, they go to different places, and take on a new identity. Some went to Europe and the Iranians there are very different to the Iranians on the west coast. Their environments have encouraged different aspects of their personality. The same thing happened with the Jamaicans and the Jordanians who came in the fifties. They became different people with different characteristics, and the idea is that you go with the flow of what you are becoming without getting too hung up on the past. You keep the traditions that you find valuable. This is the approach I adopt with my own family.

Right now I know that my son is losing a lot of the traditions that I grew up with. Speaking Farsi was a big thing for me because I spoke it growing up. I try to speak Farsi with him, and my wife speaks German to him, but then he started speaking back to me in English. Farsi is a really different language and so while I was trying to speak to my son I was comparing myself to my dad.

My dad was a quiet man and sometimes I didn’t have the emotional words in Farsi to communicate with him. I always felt there was a breakdown between us, a language barrier. Even though I spoke Farsi I couldn’t really say what I wanted to say to him. I couldn’t say these things in English either. It became this thing when I was speaking to my son in Farsi, that time was repeating itself. I don’t want to have this sort of stern relationship with my son, but the language was causing that. I was really soul searching and thought, “Ok I’m just going to have to speak to him in English now.” I would rather have a good relationship with my son than tell him off in Farsi all the time, which is what I would end up doing.

DI: How does this series connect with previous work and future concepts? Is there a thematic thread that runs through your body of work?
AM: My works since 2012 have all been small chapters in a larger story. It’s been like gathering the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. All the projects have been instigated by personal events (namely births and deaths) in the last seven years that required attention and processing. The revolution is ultimately the axis point as I flip from the past to present. I tell the story of different family members through these therapeutic investigations and conceptual works.

The opening night for Stamps of a Revolution will be held at Paper Mache Tiger on the 5th September, and is open to the public via the rsvp link here.
Following the opening night, the works will be available to buy until the end of November.