Venue
The October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AL.

Date
14 November – 7 December 2002.

Organised by
The Iran Heritage Foundation and
The October Gallery.

Curated by
Rose Issa in association with Elisabeth Lalouschek.

Introduction
The ‘Conference of the Birds’ (Mantiq al-tayr), is a masnavi, i.e. a poem in rhyming couplets, composed towards the end of the 12th century by Farid al-Din  ‘Attar (d. 1221),  the celebrated Persian poet. It is an animal fable that involves the birds of the world in the search for their king, the Simorgh. All of Graham Day’s works in this exhibition are inspired by ‘Attar’s work. He specifically chose to work with these images using relief printmaking, which is inevitably concerned with mirror images and symmetry. Day’s interest in these visual strategies is emphasised by his use of monoprint techniques. The use of anaphora, a literary device popular with ‘Attar, where words or phrases are repeated and strung together like pearls, suggests another link. Day sees the repeated printing of the bird-images, which are themselves made up of text, as a visual equivalent of this same rhetorical device.

Born in London in 1946, Graham Day studied Fine Art at the Bath Academy of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He has lectured in Printmaking since 1973. Recent one-man exhibitions of his work were held in London and Los Angeles. Examples of Day’s work are in the collections of the British Library, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Bilbliothèque Nationale in Paris; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the World Bank in Washington DC; and the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Preview and Reception – 13 November 6.30-8.00pm
(Free admission, but by RSVP only, due to security and limited space)

Evening of classical Persian music with Tinoush Bahrami (Tar) and late night viewing of exhibition  – 22 November 6.30pm
(Tickets: 7.50 Pounds [concession 5.00 Pounds])

Enquiries and RSVP
020 7242-7367, octobergallery@compuserve.com

Admissions Fee
(strictly no admission without RSVP on 13 November, due to security and limited capacity).