“Understanding the radical ways in which two people can perceive the same object with differing complexity is at the core of my investigation,” Sanaz Mazinani says. Her untitled Sanctuary design highlights the particular potency and significance of explosions, which have emerged as dominant visual tropes over her twelve years of examining news images for photographic montages. “For me, the symbolic likeness of an explosion stands in for an act of violence, but also for depictions of power . . . The explosion becomes a sublime entity to be feared and adored,” she explains. “Here, the explosion’s ability to obfuscate becomes a metaphor for politics, a symbol for the veils that simultaneously obscure and complicate reality.”
