Â鶹Éç

is an Iranian British artist who came to this country to study in the 1970s and whose work explores themes of belonging and loneliness. Her pictures are usually carefully posed and feature mournful characters portrayed in muted colours. The work is often described as cinematic, but this seems to be more to do with the sense of an interrupted narrative than blockbusting visuals, the images don't look like film stills. The series I liked best in Tate's selection was , a group of portraits featuring Iranians in Britain. They had a luminosity that doesn't come across in the reproductions, and lacked the stagey quality of many of the other pictures. Allowing the camera to rest on one person also conjured up an intimacy that often seemed absent from the other pictures. It now seems rather a photographic cliché to show people standing around stiffly, and images such as and the series employed this device again and again. and have worked this seam with great skill and it takes a really novel approach to make it seem fresh. Skip forward four hours and I was watching a man with enormous arms flinging a very small man around a wrestling ring. Mournful introspection was exchanged for grandstanding and costumes so bright and shiny they could have your eye out. I'm not a sports fan, but with the revival in variety and vaudeville I thought that I would give this very theatrical spectacle a whirl. I was also curious to see how obviously Mexican it felt, I find the imagery of the fascinating and the wrestlers, or , are huge stars in their country. Excited though the crowd were, however, I remain unconverted - it seemed like a brash pantomime and nearly indistinguishable from its North American cousin . I am undeterred, however, I plan to continue straying outside my natural territory, perhaps next time I'll be more pleasantly surprised.