On Matters of Resilience (2017-2019)

On Matters of Resilience (2017-2019) started as a series of deconstructions and reconstructions of photos taken of me during the first days of elementary school in Tehran, Iran in the mid-late 1990s. This distinct juxtaposition between my home life and my life at a school under the Islamic Republic’s theocratic rule dictated a separation of self, and through this very personal body of work I was able to begin the process of piecing myself back together. I decided to remove the faces of my classmates in the work in order to protect their identities at first. The resulting cutout with just the headscarf uniform startled me as a stark representation of this condition — our day to day lives inside a system of gender apartheid mandated by a fascist state. It felt powerful to have visually separated all of us from this symbol of the state, these forced pieces of cloth.

A more recent iteration of this work — Classroom Solidarities (2022-ongoing) — archives images of protest set in similar classroom across Iran throughout the Jin Jiyan Azadi movement.

On Matters of Resilience Installations (2018-2019)