Chahar Bagh: Leili Tehrani Walker

Misplacement, or lack of belonging, is something experienced strongly by diasporic communities. Adrift, we’re perceived as too foreign for so-called Australia, and upon returning home, too westernized for our roots. Chahar Bagh is my attempt at reconciling family tales of the homeland with my childhood in the red light district of Eora, at celebrating elements of my spiritual and religious practice that feel untethered here, and at honouring both the legacy of family who fled Iran and the rich queer history of Kings Cross itself. 

In Persian mythology, gardens exist as liminal spaces, neither in the earthly realm nor in the heavens, but rather a third realm, somewhere in between, a navel or a bridge. The Old Persian word for garden, ‘Paradis’, literally translates to ‘a place where heaven and earth meet’. Chahar Bagh are a particular kind of garden, laid out in quadrilateral form based on the four gardens of Paradise mentioned in the Qur’an, each part divided by flowing water which reflects the heavens and connects the realm of the earth with the celestial. 

In Chahar Bagh, I transpose the traditional garden into scenes from childhood, recreating the spiritually charged atmosphere amongst the neon lights and back lanes of the Cross, to invite the viewer to experience and unpack elements of their own identities and - perhaps most importantly - to celebrate the amorphous and untethered experience that it is to exist as both a trans person and part of a diaspora. 

– Leili Tehrani Walker