About my art projects
My works are in an ongoing process of reconciling my memories and dreams of past with the reality of my life and my own positioning to it. Using traditional symbolism and imagery, in my projects I try to create a narrative word in which Imagination, remembered past and perceived present integrate. In this process, the personal experiences and the social dimension of the 'I', which ties me as a native Iranian very concretely to my origins, are the central elements.
In memory trace , I represent the aspects of Iranian life in a divided society fragmentarily and without temporal continuity, combining the images from my childhood with those from the mass media. Among the represented motifs are also traditional symbols, which in turn forms a central part of the compositions in the collage images of stories I live by . Personal and collective myths and symbols serve as a metaphor to capture, thematize and question current social and political events. In Heldentaten , the narrative format is extended by a further dimension through the combination of the images with the objects, so that the space becomes a stage for the narrative. The same principle is also used in Dreaming the past ,Head in clouds and Lion in news garden , where the paintings with wall designs, reliefs, objects and floor designs become fragments of a surreal, multilayered and at the same time ambiguous narrative space in which the viewer can enter.
The Self-portraits series represents my different faces in Iran, and thereby the complexity of Iranian women's identity. It questions how many identities an Iranian woman embodies or must embody in everyday life, and in which of these multiple appearances her true identity is hidden.
'Multi-bodies' is a playful approach to established rules in the Iranian society through design female artistic dresses. The title of the Installation I is inspired by an Iranian proverb: A wife enters her marital home in a white dress and exits it wearing a white shroud. I reverse the paradigm by letting the female figure appear in a wedding dress made of original funeral linens. Installation II depicts a fashionable dress from traditional armor, which is covered in golden western haute-couture brands. This reflects the collision of the stereotypical symbols of Western consumerism and Islamic tradition but also the necessity of wearing a battle armor. In Installation III , the traditional pants of the ancient Iranian martial arts are cut up and fashioned into a woman's dress, with a train crafted out of those colorful pants covering a collection of heavy clubs used for exercise. In the series 'Multi-bodies', through remodeling the traditional textiles or garments into a new dress, I try to reinterpret the strict rules and traditional beliefs, to thematize the paradoxical reality of women in Iranian society, and to create counter images to the stereotypical portrayal of Iranian women.