The series Maman – from the Persian word for mother – explores motherhood through biographical experiences. Maman was created while the artist was pregnant with her first child and during the months following the birth of her daughter. At the centre of the series is a cut-out photograph of the artist's mother as a young woman along with appropriated images of deadly objects and weapons together with short handwritten texts in Persian reflecting on the existential dimensions of motherhood. Maman questions the institution of motherhood constituted by myths and binary notions such as good versus bad, and self-sacrificing versus self-actualizing. The work proposes no answers but instead opens up an alternative metaphysics for motherhood where ambiguity reigns and dichotomies are deconstructed.
In Healing Engines notions of memory,
loss, and mortality are interpreted through
damaged personal archival images of two
fathers. In a reiterating act of digital healing
and deletion, algorithmically generated
formations evolve, alongside extracts of
pictorial presence deviating into geometric
abstractions, code fragments, and images of
fathers digitally altered. Techniques of
replication and digital montage
are adopted to reflect on the
undependable structures of memory
and the relationship between historical
space and virtual space. Healing Engines
serves as a metaphorical border crossing
between existence and extinction.
Drawing on the tradition of mirror artwork from Iran and modern Western abstraction,
Mental States of Exile consists of mirrored and reconstructed photographic landscapes
from personally significant places in Sweden. These landscapes appear on a chador;
a semi-circular black garment, veiling women in Muslim majority countries. Here, the chador
emerges as a night sky. Included in each image are remediated handmade cartographic
signs indicating the human need for orientation. Mental States of Exile tailors an ambiguous
space where all elements escape their original meaning. New existential hybrid formations
arrive, indicating displacement and loss while simultaneously reaching for home.