In Through Tangled Threads, Tannaz Saatchi traces the layered complexities of diasporic identity, where cultural memory is inherited rather than lived. As a second-generation immigrant raised in the Iranian diaspora, Saatchi uses photography to examine the meaning, emotion, and historical value attached to inherited objects, images, and traditions that have shaped her cultural identity. Looking at her subject through a diasporic lens, she explores how collective memory is carried forward, and how it shifts and becomes abstract with time and distance. Her photographs invite viewers to consider identity as a layered and negotiable construct of imagination.
 

The exhibition weaves together three interrelated series. In Through Tangled Threads (2024), archival photographs and culturally significant objects are physically intertwined, creating textured surfaces that reveal the entanglement of memory, absence, and belonging. Around the Kitchen Table (2024) turns to domestic rituals, where family narratives are pieced together through objects rather than faces, mapping a lineage built through memory rather than direct experience.
 

In A Language I Almost Speak (2025), Saatchi embraces the tension between authenticity and performance, staging symbolic objects under the studio spotlight to explore how identity is both embodied and performed.
 

Across these works, Saatchi bridges the space between presence and absence, between inherited culture and contemporary existence. Her photographs speak to the dissonance and beauty of living in-between—where identity finds form in quiet persistence—ever evolving, ever reaching.
 

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Curated by Shadi Shadbahr
 

This exhibition is part of the 2026 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.