Barbad Golshiri’s practice is prolific and wide ranging – extending from photography and sculpture to installation, films and critical writing. Central to some of his recent pieces is the examination of how media is used and how it manipulates the regime and its masses in his homeland of Iran. Golshiri’s Portrait Of The Artist As A One Year Old Child is an altered photograph of himself as a baby – taken in 1983, the year a close friend of Golshiri’s family, with a son the same age as Barbad, was executed. The image is presented as a reversal of fortune, illustrating the precariousness of circumstance and the spanning consequences of violence; in Persian the word ’reverse’ is the same word used for ’photo’. Hung upside down, Golshiri’s Dorian Gray-like portrait warps time, conceiving an alternative course of events. The child’s face has been digitally altered to that of a geriatric, freakishly weathered and wise; the inscription written at the top right of the image, “Barbad, when one year old, ’62″ – 1362 in the Persian Solar Hijri calendar – when inverted, suggests the baby is 62 years of age.