Our journey is a combination of trials. We constantly building and rebuilding our life. Winning and losing are the result of the games we are playing. Crashes and falls are part of the learning process to get closer to success, balance and self-understanding. These practices are getting us closer to fathoming all the levels of ourselves to finally experience the consciousness within. The goal is to meditate the mind to clear all the spots and become one to our own mind.
In this video I tried to create an experience to show how this sphere is spinning around our life. The challenges we are facing in this practice are created by the world around us and sometimes ourselves. So, the important factor is to believe that we have power over all these up and downs. The result is in our mind and all we need is to clear the mind to get to the highest level of Dhyana.
Winter 2019
In this series of photographs, I tried to distill the repressive atmosphere and the struggle that I faced growing up in a strict and controlled religious society to those literally felt by a person under water, struggling for life, unable to move freely or breathe, being pull down with a black Chador (Hijab). The uncanny is being portrayed in black-and-white and high contrast. The goal was to symbolically convey the pain I felt in a repressive society but expressed in physical imagery and symbols.
Our society was a farce, where the majority of my network kept an outward Islamic image while struggling for freedom against its repressive forces. Not only were dreams of many careers repressed, but even mundane enjoyment of music, dancing, or drinking were illegal. In public women had to cover their bodies and hair to prevent arousal in men, making everyday life painful, and many other activities like outdoor exercise or swimming difficult or impossible.
As the sunshine of childhood faded, and I became an adolescent more aware of the larger society, I started to realize that these constraints on clothing and behavior have far more pervasive and pernicious consequences. The don’t just restrict one’s attire, they kill dreams and aspirations.
The only limit to one’s dreams ought to be one’s talents and perseverance. As shown in the photos, no white balloon of hope and ambition should burst with the black ink of society’s repression.
Summer 2019
For the past forty years the Iranian people have been experiencing an extremely repressive state. There are no basic freedoms like there are in Western liberal democracies, and there are frequent arrests for moral crimes. These occur for religious reasons or for speaking out for human or women’s rights. The sentences are harsh, and frequently are given in absentia. There are no restrictions on the power of the police, and thus no safety against unreasonable searches or seizures, with the police able to enter your house at any time. Questioning their authority results in heavier punishment.
The contrast between the freedoms here and the injustice in my country motivated me to create art to increase the awareness of this injustice in Iran. In this photo series and video I randomly chose 50 prisoners of the last decade, and showed their names, their sentences, their crime and the time of their arrest. I used “United for Iran, Iran Prisons Atlas” as my source.
Some of these prisoners are in exile, while others cannot leave the country and are not able to work anymore. Some have been in house arrest more than a decade. Though there have been many protests and demonstrations, all have been repressed, with the participants tracked down, killed or imprisoned.
Fall 2019
Collaboration with Khaleghi’s Sisters
“Special thanks to Lauren X. Stewart for performing in this project”
Moving to San Francisco and being exposed to an open sexual culture gave me an opportunity to further explore this subject. The first time I observed a rope bondage performance I found it very disturbing. Going to different sex workshops, I was surprised by the immense variety of people interested. I saw people of different ages, from young adults to older couples, gay couples, couples with makeup who were exquisitely dressed, and other couples with no makeup and simple attire. I realized that that the interplay between desire and inhibition can take many forms, but almost always there are prejudices about sexual behaviors and deep-rooted inhibitions that hinder the process of self-discovery.
Where I grew up, in the closed culture of Iran, one naturally expects sexual taboos. But I was surprised by the amount of sexual prejudice in the West, even in those attending these events, and wondered about the source. Clearly there is a universal element, and starting with myself, I decided to put myself through the same process of rope bondage to experience a higher intensity, hoping to discover more about my own sexual desire and elucidate the inhibitions that disturbed me when I watched this process for the first time.
In this series I am capturing the process of me being roped in different ways and discovering my body’s respond to the pressure and pain and the resulting sexual feelings. I tried to push myself out of my comfort zone to elucidate my hidden emotions and boundaries. And I hope by presenting this work I can also inspire the audience to examine their own attitudes that might be shaped by hidden assumptions and forgotten experiences.
I captured the process from the view above, looking down on myself. The aim in breaking the normal frontal perspective is to encourage the audience to form an alternative view of the matter. Other images focus on the rope’s prints on my body, returning to the original idea of marks on the skin that started this exploration.
The silk rug has personal symbolism, since it was a gift from my father and evokes strong memories of our relationship. I chose a lady to perform with me to help me focus on emotions aroused by the process rather than evoking a potential sexual response aroused by a masculine figure.
In continuation of sleeping series, I photograph couples in their sleeping outfit with their significant other to see the differences and the level of the comfort between them. I chose my models in a way that would allow me to study different genders with different sexual interests. This made me to look at works of Jana Romanova a German Photographer who did a series of photograph of pregnant couples while they are actually sleeping. I consider sleeping the most pure time in our life. There is no reason for people to hide their comfort in their asleep. I realized reproducing that moment could reveal many realities of their relationship. I experienced a deep pleasure of photographing couples in this state. They immediately get into their comfort zone in a very natural way.
In this series of photographs I am attempting to capture some essence of a relationship through the intimacy of sleeping positions. By directing the couples and asking for various moods and positions, I am influencing what the couples may decide to portray or show. Although I wish to capture a certain glimpse into their relationship, I also feel my own role in projecting onto the couples, which cause them to project a mood or feeling that they wish to show. Therefore, my perspective is combined with the couple’s own interpretation and we end up with a completely new angle or view. Despite the mise en scene, there is still something authentic and there is an intermingling of truth with exaggeration.
I am trying to recreate the image of human bodies in the most peaceful and disarming moment, which is sleeping. My works include simple photographs of sleeping postures from the view above looking down on to the bed. It is not a view we would normally see in our waking lives. The view from above also reveals bodies seemingly suspended. I want to capture bodies in motion yet completely disarmed and still, falling yet calm and peaceful.
It all started from my own challenges in my relationship. As I was going deeper into my relationship, I started experiencing the time limitation that we are facing because of our individual lives and the difficulty of finding free time to spend together. My partner and I begin to drift away from doing the things that we promised to do and things that we haven’t gotten around to planning, even though we lived in the same house and slept in the same bed. I started getting more attached to the time when we were sleeping together. I was so fascinated in the ways that our bodies would tie together and find new ways of positioning themselves every single time.
Relationships between two people always appeal to me. Even though this is a common subject, most people in the world are struggling to achieve this intimate long-term relation. To learn how to live with another person and respect his/her interests and love him/her with all the differences that two might have is not an easy task. I have been most inspired by works of Marina Abramovic and Ulay performances. I appreciate the intensity of their work and how they express relationship in a very unique way. Their collaborative work made me to think more about my own experience of being in a long-term relationship.
In this series of photograph, my partner (at the time) and I created a performance which portrayed our relationship. Despite of the all the up and downs of our relationship, after six years of togetherness, I believe we were able to send each other free in a peaceful state and learn a lot from our experience.
