I could begin my statement by saying that I’m an interdisciplinary artist whose work centers on post-memory, ecological grief, endangered species, and habitat loss. But that’s not my way of thinking, or framing.
My work is precisely scientific and wildly poetic. I grew up between the two. My mother was a tornado, my father dew. One studied geology; the other, theology and ethnomusicology. Growing up between these ways of understanding the world, I developed a seemingly inconsistent language that belongs to neither and to both. I am drawn to spaces where contradictions coexist and distinctions dissolve: between self and environment, banal and ritual, science and fiction, representation and materiality.
I’m drawn to aesthetic and visual relationships, colors, and associations. The compelling aesthetic in my work comes from my early and concurrent exposure to beauty and its absence in my surroundings: my father’s calligraphy, Safavid manuscripts, the Hyrcanian Forest, Seljuk buildings, and the visually chaotic, mismatched, and excessive forms that surrounded me in Tehran. Beauty in my work is often a construction, but it can also be a trap that pulls the viewer in; once inside, they’re immersed in a world that refuses to let them escape.
My work is also built on tension and contradiction. I create still and moving images that document my futile gestures in various habitats, natural and urban. These gestures including my performances are both ritualistic and banal. My body is at times absent, yet these works are self-portraits. I am interested in the uncertain place where the self ends and its habitat begins. This is where veins, skin, and clothes come into play: overlapping layers of inhabitant and habitat. In my work, there is no line between domestic and industrial, natural and urban, private and public. Everything is simultaneously within myself and a habitat to me. This collapse of categories is at the core of my practice.
I work across photography, painting, and sculpture, rarely trusting a single medium. If I paint, there is photography within it. If it is a photograph, I attach a material to ground it. I collect materials from the sites and narratives I work with: flora, fauna, and objects such as uncollected trash. Tactility is not negotiable.
My work is also deeply shaped by time, both conceptually and technically. I work on large paintings for years, allowing the painting to dictate changes in my personal life and relationships, while also changing elements within the painting as the real world around me changes. Unexpected Returns, a ten-year painting project, is one example. In geology, the scale of time is radically different from the rhythms of human life. In my practice, and perhaps in my sense of time, I am closer to a geologist. I think of myself as an artist who tries to capture temporariness and the unreliability of perception through slowness, only to discover that what I ultimately capture is extinction and disappearance.