Pegah Farahmand

At the heart of pilgrimage lies a movement between thresholds: the sacred and the profane; body and spirit; the material world and what might exist beyond it. The journey and its destination are inseparable, each invested with the possibility of transformation. This book traces that impulse across sacred and secular landscapes, exploring the forms pilgrimage takes in contemporary life.

Across the work, bodies are veiled, obscured, exposed or transformed; landscapes become bodily and anatomical, while human forms seem to emerge from and return to the natural world. The veil recurs as a threshold through which something can be glimpsed without ever being fully revealed. The boundaries between body and spirit, sexuality and spirituality, the sacred and the profane begin to dissolve.

The photographs consider the ways encounters with the sacred have long been mediated through images. Icons and stained glass give way to phone screens; pilgrimage moves between devotion, projection and spectacle.

Across these recurring forms, pilgrimage becomes part of a larger cycle of wearing away and renewal: of birth, transformation, decay and return.