The Gallery of Portraits and Icons serves as a framework for a curious assemblage, linking us to objects, elements of documentation, and images derived from artworks—works that are themselves conceived upon such reflective principles. The configuration of this gallery centers on the study of art fragments—pieces created in relation to their subjects and audiences—which now confront us with collective memory and its aesthetic resonances across time.
Within the space formed by the interplay of portrait and icon, the notions of time, endurance, and reinterpretation emerge as an arrangement of faces and signs. Each segment of the gallery recalls a dialogue between human and image—a dialogue that transforms personal memory into collective heritage, inviting viewers to contemplate visual inheritance and the gradual erosion of meaning within our visual culture.
Ultimately, the Gallery of Portraits and Icons is not merely a site of presentation, but a structure for reconstructing visual history through memory and reflection—a place where the aesthetics of the artwork, intertwined with the processes of forgetting and remembrance, become a sign of contemporary visual life.

Seals
In the series “Seals and Portraits”, more than ten thousand seals taken from mosques and religious edifices are intertwined with personnel portraits from the past four decades of Iran, revealing an image of coexistence between faith and everyday life. This visual composition reconstructs the social history of people who have inscribed their identities between prostration and signature, between sacred belief and bureaucratic order.
Each seal acts as a cell of collective memory—a mark of time upon faith. Alongside, the silent administrative portraits unfold an image of the compliant yet resilient human being confronting history. The display cases open stratified layers of memory: from Sasanian plaster inscriptions and Safavid textiles patterned with peacocks, to lithographic prints of good and evil, all recalling the inner struggle of humanity between faith and doubt, light and darkness.
Within this framework, seals acquire a political meaning—from the mosque’s religious seal to the state’s official stamp—each simultaneously a sign of sanctity and authority. The confrontation of the sacred and the administrative gives rise to a depiction of the enduring tension between faith and obedience—two opposing domains that find a shared visage in the official portrait: the Iranian individual defined at the threshold of belief and duty, light and shadow.
Ultimately, “Seals” reflects our collective face—a people who have carved their faith upon stone and soil and have stamped their lives with bureaucratic marks; a realm where sanctity and reality, mysticism and bureaucracy, intertwine to allow the spark of spirituality to persist within contemporary life.

Images of Iranian Migrant Families
In this series, Nasser Bakhshi narrates the silent wound and hidden memories of families who have experienced migration not merely as a geographical displacement, but as an existential transformation—a change in the patterns of living and perceiving themselves. The images are recreated within curiosity boxes, functioning as personal museums of memory, situated between documentation and imagination, between archiving and the anxiety of forgetting.
Each box offers a perspective on cultural life in West Asia—a region perpetually oscillating between political reality and aesthetic imagination. Through the logic of collage, Bakhshi brings together the disjointed and continuous forms of migrant life within a single frame: displaced faces, incomplete homes, fractured frames, and traces of lost belonging that, in his visual aesthetics, evolve into temporal and poetic figures.
This collection is not only a portrayal of migration as a political or economic experience; it raises a fundamental question about belonging, memory, and cultural continuity. Bakhshi’s boxes, modest and silent in appearance, open like chambers within the museum of our collective unconscious—spaces where politics, art, and the destiny of the migrant converge in a visual and conceptual composition.
Through these works, the boundary between document and imagination dissolves, confronting the viewer with an aesthetics of life under the fluidity of identity and place. Thus, rather than depicting migrants, Bakhshi’s work itself becomes a part of migration—a journey across the terrains of image, memory, and imagination of the West Asian human experience.

Textiles
Throughout the history of civilization, textiles have been far more than mere garments or ritual tools; they are living signs of belief, morality, and cultural existence—languages of faith and memory woven into enduring threads of color and pattern. Each textile is a lived text, a document of human presence at the intersections of tradition, meaning, and material.
In a contemporary reading, textiles transcend their functional or ceremonial dimensions, becoming a philosophical expression of the relationship among sensation, memory, and identity. In these works, touch and sight are as meaningful as thought and narrative. The works of Nasser Bakhshi embody this transformation through the lens of a cultural self-portrait—a re-reading that begins with the texture itself and extends toward reflection on the interplay between sensory perception and meaning in the modern condition.
Within this perspective, textiles reflect the cultural life of West Asia, a geography where the endurance of weaving traditions amid social and political shifts exemplifies both cultural resilience and the aesthetics of everyday life. Every thread carries a dialogue between past and present, ritual and modernity, memory and corporeal experience.
Thus, textiles move beyond the domains of craft and ritual into the theoretical space of contemporary art—where material becomes meaning, and aesthetics emerge as a reflection of memory and human existence.

Archive: Visual Manifestations of Good and Evil in Lithographed Books Printed in Tabriz
The collection of lithographed books preserved in the Nasser Bakhshi Museum Archive—comprising more than five thousand volumes—includes selected examples presented in the first hall through the visual lens of good and evil. Beyond their historical and aesthetic dimensions, these books are examined in this project from the perspective of the visual embodiment of moral dualities.

The lithographed imagery, often striking in its directness, reveals a vivid confrontation with the notions of virtue and vice. Historical, literary, and religious publications, each open to multifaceted interpretation, reflect complex intersections of ornamentation, stylistic heritage, and symbolic representation. Within these richly illustrated works—alongside other artifacts and objects—distinct and intricate points emerge that visually trace the tension between good and evil across the cultural and spiritual landscape of their time.

The Embodiment of Pain in the Poetry of Devotional Poets

The embodiment of pain in the poetry of devotional poets reveals one of the most significant aesthetic dimensions within a space inspired by both lyricism and suffering. Independent of the poets’ intellectual tendencies, this sphere serves as an extraordinary source for studying the manifestation of pain through poetic diction across nearly three centuries of devotional verse, offering remarkable examples by many of the foremost religious poets.
Through the lens of good and evil, devotional poetry becomes the expression of complex modes of belief that have nurtured mythological and heroic perspectives native to this cultural geography. The poetic lyricism of these texts allows not only an examination of the emotional and spiritual states of their communities but also a tracing of embodied representations of moral dualities—the tangible visions of good and evil—interwoven within their poetic consciousness.