Lot 117: From the Series A Nightmare of an Era Hammurabi: The Law Codes

SADEGH TIRAFKAN (IRANIAN, B. 1965)
From the Series A Nightmare of an Era Hammurabi: The Law Codes
signed, titled, numbered and dated 'Hammurabi the law codes "2001" #2,4/9 S.TIRAFKAN-tahran-IRAN' and signed in Farsi (on the reverse)
Fuji color crystal archive print
26¼ x 39 5/8in. (66.5 x 100.3cm.)
Executed in 2001, this work is number 4 from an edition of 9

London, Christies, Iranian Contemporary Art, 19-23 May 2002 (illustrated in colour, p. 99)

Christies, Iranian Contemporary: An Exhibition in Association with the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue, London, 2002 (another from a smaller format edition illustrated in colour, p. 99)

"As a hobby, during my adolescent years, I pictured myself as others. Later on, as a photographer, this notion took another format, that is, I placed myself in photographs where others stood in the past.

Five years ago, while I was in Choghazanbil Temple, shooting self portraits for a project, I began to study Hammurabi, King of Babel. He is known to have written legal codes, some 2,500 years ago.A few were most interesting: Code 129 : If a man's wife was caught sleeping with another man, they were tied together and drowned. Code 133 : If a man's wife refused her husband, she was condemned and drowned.

These photgraphs reminisce the nightmare of the era and I have tried to place myself as the woman, the lover, the husband and the King Hammurabi who wrote and implemented the law. These photgraphic series were taken in Shoush, in Choghazanbil, in southwest of Iran, near the Karoun River" Sadegh Tirafkan, The Iranian, November 13, 2001.