• Gol-O-Morgh/گل و مرغ
• Mixed Media (2018 – 2021) / ترکیب مواد (۱۴۰۰ – ۱۳۹۷)

“Staging Failure”
The idea of making this series began in response to an exhibition invitation outside Iran on Gol-o-Morgh (a tradition of Persian miniature painting) in which I did not participate. My initial thoughts were centered on rejection – that, is a refusal to accord with the market desire that is constantly perpetuated by its local players towards distinctively Iranian imagery and a fixed notion of historical past; a desirable aesthetic that aims to for compensate the discord of social experience. This rejection later evolved towards ambivalence, and then failure.
How is it possible to reject and attack that which constitutes you? Can art go through a hunger strike to resume its freedom? Would it survive? Does it really have the will? Since what is at stake here is not a bare transmission of real experience, nor an art which relies upon this real expereince as its subject matter. It is rather an editing of personal experience already filtered as art. This editing, that is putting together fragments of “staged life”, cannot resist but to fall into creating a whole. It thus, becomes that which it aims to criticize or alter, it stoops down to a deception.
How to avoid such conformity? What are the cultural forms of the present? How through them, as an act of editing implies, can one find that which they do not respond to? How to describe the historical present without affirming an imposed unifying force? A stand-point from the space occupied in time by something which has not yet existed and is as such impossible. It is this idea of heaven on earth – the impossible experience – that calls upon me from Gol o Morgh. How to exist within immortal time as a finitude? What could be the characters of eternal time other than the ceaseless production of temporalized forms? It is not the bird, nor the flowers, or even the geometrical relations between them which reveals the being of “heaven time” but the sound that is absent in the painting.
 I continued this absence, the missing something, as the remnant of heaven. I brought together actual everyday objects, such as endangered wild flowers local to Tehran and its suburbs, flowers of mourning ceremonies, weddings, mass-produced chickens, feathers found in streets, dust-all unliving. The unified world of Gol o Morgh style, is substituted by invisible resin that encompasses everything, it prevents anything entering or leaving the world of the work. By fixing all objects it grants them immortality. They can stay unliving forever, as long as they keep their fixed forms. The works of this series treat time as their container, as that which prevents everything from moving and changing, no alterations of form and visual elements manage to break through. 
I chose the real objects as they withhold time. Their coming together makes new connections between these times, unified as Gol o Morgh, while stripped away from it, deprived from it. Is this a forced unification too? A unification imposed which demands all its elements to exist within its laws. I too put in my share of time as an outsider to the world of these works, placed myself in the margins of my relation with the objects – objects which belong to my everyday experience. I stayed over two years with these questions, with the tension between heaven and its impossibility as an actual form, the tension of desiring and renouncing, the tension of the unity of disjunctive times and lives. The dimensions of my failure consists of a unification of my own visual history and possible forms of the present, with no space between the two.