'I work to work out the turbulence that exists within me.
 I am very emotional, I am filled to the rim,
 The work is my release; it's where everything spills out.
 It's about falling, standing and attempting to survive it all.
 In the end we are all just visiting,
 And we come to this world alone and we leave alone.
 But while we are here, we try so desperately
 To belong to something, to someone and to somewhere.'
(Sara Rahbar)

When the Iranian-born artist Sara Rahbar began her Flag series in 2005 in which she assembled objects and textiles she had found and collected throughout years, she was soon considered to be one of the leading emerging artists from the Middle-East. Reminiscing the flags created a few decades earlier by Jasper Johns, the assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg or those of the Neo-dada movement and utterly inspired by her own experience, her work is not merely social or political, nor can it be clustered within any established movement. It rather reveals the artist's technique and expresses her strong personal statement.

With the present work Leyli Jan, Sara Rahbar uses the roughness of the military coat as her own canvas. Interested in soft almost sculptural assemblages, she customizes the vintage American military coat with old Persian coins found in various street markets. The words embroidered with gold threads are extracted from a popular folkloric Persian song, about love and passion ('I want to go to the mountains to hunt the deer Where is my gun, Dear Leyli Where is my gun?). Sara Rahbar's embellished assemblage plays around with various textures and alludes to the contrasts between the harsh and violent backdrop to her work and the lyricism of the word, as if to evoke her own hybrid cultural heritage and the dualities inherent to our contemporary society.

Leyli Jan is a striking example of Sara Rahbar's artistic exploration and it reveals her quest for freedom through art.