Your practice is very interdisciplinary, but as of late, you seem to go back towards drawing. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Drawing is me reviewing my process of making 3D artworks that I focused more on since I immigrated to America. I had been so excited to push it further and discover more possibilities of creating installations, but as time went on, I started to think about my earlier focus on painting and drawing.
I used to go to the outskirts of Tehran, next to the mountains, and draw with charcoal and pastel from the mountains. I felt that desire to work on paper started to come back little by little, giving me a chance to revisit the sources of inspiration I had. It also opened up new possibilities for me to find other natural elements in New York, like the East River. This part of my practice helped me discover the bridge that connects New York and Tehran, and pushed me beyond a focus on materiality, back into my poetry writing. Eventually, I felt more grounded by transferring from 3D to 2D, which was a whole new world.
Can you tell us more about the transition from drawing to translating it into your sculptural works, as well as your works that include a lot of different types of materiality? You have your glass pieces, textile pieces, and you kind of spread out from th
Growing up and seeing how my mom did upcycling by sewing and dyeing, always making sure that she made something out of the fabric leftovers, is at the core of my practice. I realized that this was my habitat too; growing up playing with large sheets of fabric for my mom’s prayer chador, bedsheet, and carpet. I think by being far away from home, it’s becoming clearer that those elements are still with me. I use the leftovers of my installations to create tapestries, which I either hand sew or create with the sewing machine. The funny thing is that I used to be very scared of using the sewing machine.
The first time that I tried sewing was when my mom taught me over FaceTime. Those tapestry pieces were a product of my education in academic painting, both in Iran and here in America, combined with those skills from my mother. I also drew from my research on miniatures, which was a very exciting and endless journey. I once had a conversation with one of my professors back at Yale about the sublime in Western painting, and how that would be found differently in a miniature, because the goal for the artist was not to create the real world, but an imaginary one. These tapestry pieces gave me the chance to create a landscape from my unconscious, so that I could show the duality and the placelessness of my experiences here in New York.
After that, I started these drawings, alongside writing and making tapestries, I began exploring sound as a material. For me, it has always been difficult to translate Persian into English. Persian is very poetic; it’s not as straightforward, and it has a lot of metaphors in it. I ended up inventing a system that recorded and analyzed the frequency of my voice while I was reading my poems in Persian and in English. I then transfer those frequencies onto the glass, casting a shadow that creates a minimal mountainous landscape on the wall. I wanted to create something that you can see, but doesn’t have physicality. It speaks to my experiences as an immigrant that you know deeply you have these capabilities, but having no ground to use or show them. So, my curiosity and my lifestyle make me constantly research and think about different materials and translate them back into the way that I make something.
You often use the term imaginary landscapes to describe the way your work bridges the terrestrial reminders of the mountains in Tehran with the ephemeral aspects of your memory. Can you talk about where this idea comes from and how it manifests in your pr
I think it’s a combination of a few things. I remember one of the things that I used to do with my brother was using my mom’s prayer chadors and making huge knots, connecting them, and turning them into a huge, giant tent, turning the room into a very surreal place. It was so fun to just go into those wrinkles, peaks, and valleys and play hide and seek with my brother. It gave me a very special feeling to transform the atmosphere of the room. After I got my bachelor’s degree, I was interested in drawing in the city, to sit somewhere and do some landscape paintings or drawings with some figures in them. Unfortunately, this proved to be challenging, and I ended up next to the mountains in Tehran, where it was peaceful. Naturally, the figures were erased, and my focus became more on studying the landscape. I think it became very meditative for me to have my outdoor refuge, which I used for almost two years.
Eventually, I was curious to try another material. I grew up in a household where large pieces of fabric were always available, and I remember making my first experimental work in our backyard, trying to understand more about the draping and form. I felt so comfortable with the material itself and found the forms very exciting. Now I understand that I was trying to evoke the joy that I felt as a child. Eventually, I had the chance to create a suspended piece in the form of a mountain inside a small gallery with blue walls in the central part of Tehran. It was really interesting because if you stepped out of the gallery, you would see Tehran’s huge mountain range come into view. And if you stepped back inside, the suspended piece would be right there. It was very magical to have both of these elements, in reality and in fiction.
After I immigrated, I was far away from the source of my inspiration and in an environment with nothing in common with Tehran. When I looked at the landscape in Connecticut, it was like a postcard. The colors were different, and even the angle of the light in the sky was different. During this time, I became inspired to research Persian literature about Mount Qaf, a fictional mountain far away. I felt like the location of my existence, in comparison to home, was like being on an inaccessible mountain. Digging into the literature, I began to write poetry, to re-evaluate and transform the meaning of the mountain itself. The suspension of it is because of this duality, and also creating something from memory. When I did a residency a few years ago next to the East River, I found myself going by the river every day to draw, to write my poetry. It became a way to create a bridge between Tehran and New York, where I could create this surreal, imaginary landscape based on both of these cities.
Your poetry is so key to all of the work that you make. Do you write the poetry first and then it becomes a work, or does it happen at the same time?
In my practice, I tend to write the poem first, which I then translate. Based on that, I will start to make some drawings, figuring out how I am going to transform it into a visual image. I read a lot of poetry or fictional stories, but the ongoing story is usually in my mind. I like writing in my notebooks about the things that I think about or the changes that are happening around me. It opens up a way to enter into literature. I usually write the poems in Persian, which becomes a refuge for me to express the loneliness of immigration. My poetry actually started earlier, when I started grad school. The very first thing that I did was a performance, where I translated [my poetry] with Google Translate back in 2017, which produced something totally nonsensical. I read the poem in Persian in a room, and I gave everyone the imperfect English translation, and the audience got confused, like, what is going on? What is this? From this point, my poetry developed.
You have recently returned to a painting practice that you haven’t had for six years. Can you tell us about that decision and what brought you back to this medium?
I have an academic background in painting, but after discovering the possibilities of working with fabric, I was so excited to push it further. Having worked with it for a while, I started to go back from 3D to 2D, which opened my eyes to parts of the work that I didn’t notice before. I think a part of it is also my curiosity toward my own body as a woman. The Women, Life, Freedom movement changed the way I thought about my body and my existence, about how much freedom or safety I have in a public place here in New York. Even after five years of living in New York, I’m sometimes still shocked that I’m not getting harassed. When I made the installation Under the Same Sky, which was a lot about what was going on in Iran, I actually started with a poem, and then I made the installation. I have a series of photographs where I am inside the piece, working on this installation. When I looked back on these photographs, I started to think about the relationship between my body as a woman next to these fabrics. It was so normal for me to just erase myself and my body. To just make the work, but not exist within it.
