The Road to Oxiana is a title I have borrowed from a book written by Robert Byron about his travel from Italy to Oxiana in Afghanistan in the 1930s. Travel logs like Byron’s told in the tradition of British colonial culture, have had a huge impact on my conception of the world. My strategy for developing the works is to travel to places loosely relating to Byron’s route and to examine conceptions and representations of the actual places, before, during and after the journey.

In The Road to Oxiana, Station I: Cairo, I aimed to balance the romantic impressions by studying political history from the region. I combined different styles of representation, seductive/poetic with powerful/journalistic.

Station II: Istanbul was a commission for Henie-Onstad Art Centre. The film includes my own reflections on places, names, seductive images, moving the body from one place to another, perception, and problems of changing established conceptions.