from within, so together
Mona Bozorgi & Tokie Rome-Taylor
Curated by Ashley Kauschinger
Swan Coach House Gallery, Atlanta, GA
September 10 - October 17, 2025
from within, so together, pairs the work of interdisciplinary photographers Mona Bozorgi and Tokie Rome-Taylor. Both artists reframe photographic representation by decolonizing imagery and challenging historical and contemporary portrayals of women, Iranians, and African Americans. Their practices blend photography with textiles, sculpture, installation, archival processes, and digital techniques, creating boundary-crossing forms that explore the symbolic exchange between culture, image, and object. In dialogue, their work shares a commitment to challenging dominant photographic traditions and expanding the language of identity, memory, and belonging.
Mona Bozorgi examines the power dynamics of representing women in Iran, where government control extends into daily life through surveillance and mandated veiling. Working with images of women in protest collected online, she prints them on silk and then methodically removes threads, creating compositions that recall both geometric Islamic design and historical photographic traditions while subverting state control representation. Her process of revealing and concealing through the manipulation of fabric mirrors the tension between visibility and erasure that defines Iranian women's experience. This removal of threads also transforms how we perceive the image, compelling the viewer to adjust their perspective. As viewers adapt their view to comprehend the altered images, they are asked to consider how control, concealment, and resistance shape the ways women are seen or unseen.
Tokie Rome-Taylor addresses the archival gaps left by slavery and systemic erasure, asking what happens when there is no photographic evidence of those who came before us. Drawing from her experience as a "daughter of the Diaspora," she creates contemporary visual folktales through constructed images that center African American children, often her own family. Her practice combines cyanotypes, textiles, and found objects to construct speculative visual histories that serve as a form of pilgrimage for future ancestry. By honoring women's work through sewing, family documentation, and memory preservation, Rome-Taylor's tactile, layered compositions create contemporary artifacts that fill historical voids. Her manipulation of photographic surfaces transforms traditional photography into something beyond pure vision, incorporating body knowledge and spiritual connection to land and lineage.
Together, Bozorgi and Rome-Taylor reveal how the photographic image can be reworked into something tactile, embodied, and resistant. Using photography as an art form that not only remembers but also reimagines, their works stand as acts of reclamation, expanding the possibilities of image-making as a language of survival, presence, and belonging.
Mona Bozorgi examines the power dynamics of representing women in Iran, where government control extends into daily life through surveillance and mandated veiling. Working with images of women in protest collected online, she prints them on silk and then methodically removes threads, creating compositions that recall both geometric Islamic design and historical photographic traditions while subverting state control representation. Her process of revealing and concealing through the manipulation of fabric mirrors the tension between visibility and erasure that defines Iranian women's experience. This removal of threads also transforms how we perceive the image, compelling the viewer to adjust their perspective. As viewers adapt their view to comprehend the altered images, they are asked to consider how control, concealment, and resistance shape the ways women are seen or unseen.
Tokie Rome-Taylor addresses the archival gaps left by slavery and systemic erasure, asking what happens when there is no photographic evidence of those who came before us. Drawing from her experience as a "daughter of the Diaspora," she creates contemporary visual folktales through constructed images that center African American children, often her own family. Her practice combines cyanotypes, textiles, and found objects to construct speculative visual histories that serve as a form of pilgrimage for future ancestry. By honoring women's work through sewing, family documentation, and memory preservation, Rome-Taylor's tactile, layered compositions create contemporary artifacts that fill historical voids. Her manipulation of photographic surfaces transforms traditional photography into something beyond pure vision, incorporating body knowledge and spiritual connection to land and lineage.
Together, Bozorgi and Rome-Taylor reveal how the photographic image can be reworked into something tactile, embodied, and resistant. Using photography as an art form that not only remembers but also reimagines, their works stand as acts of reclamation, expanding the possibilities of image-making as a language of survival, presence, and belonging.
