Every day we flip through newspaper, a child or a women does no longer exist…
Within a few lines they died. My photographs are about those tormented, scarred,
and forgotten women and children whom are vanished from our memory.
Photographs are reconstructed with cuts of newspaper from yesterday, today or tomorrow,
and images of my friends who are still alive, but with their faded pictures
reviving the violence and making witnessed on a daily basis.
“Lasting women | victims”, are the repetition of moments in which we live…
If you still flip through newspaper, another picture is sitting there, awaiting you.
I came of age in a traditional-bound small town on the border of desert.
The city with intertwined ways that was still, in the beginning of experiencing the modern world, and its possibilities and hazards.
When I went to Tehran University, we migrated to Karaj. A city on the border of Tehran.
For me, arriving to the new city, collided with encountering the new situation. I groped forward and experienced toward understanding the modern world, outside and the new world inside me.
Meaning of geography is “the study of the physical features of the earth and its atmosphere, and of human activity as it affects and is affected by these, including the distribution of populations and resources, land use, and industries.”
In this way, these works are about me, my land and askew inerside.3. Nowru Family Portrait. 2011.
Nowruz _traditional holiday in Iranian calendar_ 1390, in historical zone of Ardakan _a city near Yazd in the middle of Iran. We prepared a structure for photography from Iranian family in their journeys.
In each photo we made a mounted one as present for the family and asked them, to write in margins of another print, for the others who may glance or gaze at their traces.
4. Ice
Installation with an icebox, some volumes of ice,
and aspects of kids that taken from newspaper. 2011.Barbod, Hanieh, Jhina, Delara, Behnoud, Nima, Parsa, Sepideh, Zahra, Zahra, Mehdi,
Maryam, Hadiseh, Amin, Shahrouz, Kimia, Elahe, Setayesh, Fatemeh, Narges, Amir, Iman,
Rahim, Hosein, Safar, Mohammadreza, Amir, Parham, Reza, Mohammad, Behnam, Javad, Bahman, Mohammad, Abolfazl, Nafiseh, Farhad, Fatemeh, Leila, Zahra, Mohammad, Hamed, Karim, Saeeid, Amin, Andia, Meysam, Mohammadpouya …
These kids do no longer exist…
They are victims of family violence.
Maybe _I hope_ whenever these volumes of ice are taken and put down,
reticence of these eyes and vibrancy of these surfaces are evocative.
Connected and disconnected with these volumes of human beings,
calling to my mind, haunting first lines of Marshall Berman’s “All that is solid melts into air”:
“… the idea that those who are most happily at home in the modern world, as he was, maybe be most vulnerable to the demons that haunt it; the idea that the daily routine of playground and bicycles, of shopping and eating and cleaning up, of ordinary hugs and kisses, may be not only infinitely joyous and beautiful but also infinitely precarious and fragile; that it may take desperate and heroic struggles to sustain this life, and sometimes we lose. Ivan Karamazov says that, more than anything else, the death of children makes him want to give back his ticket to the universe. But he does not give it back. He keeps on fighting and loving; he keeps on keeping on.”
5. Fly. 2011 – 2013.
Whenever the cage’s door is opened, as neglect or deception, often the bird is staying. Extended…
If it passes, joyous and equity are not experienced…
Perhaps it dies from famine or is hunted after anguish.
Because of not being trained _ for flying or existence in a wild word.
This work, excuse of fly and firmament, is opened on human condition and family of men.
These tiny beings with humans, and what is done on them, are about us and conflict on our ideas.
6. On tame. 2014 to now.
…
Said the little prince, “I am looking for friends. What does that mean −− ‘tame’?”
“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. It means to establish ties.”
“‘To establish ties’?”
“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”
…
But he came back to his idea.
“My life is very monotonous,” the fox said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain−fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…”
The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.
“Please −− tame me!” he said.
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint−Exupery
7. She is a she (You are not created Nonsense)*. 2014 to now.
Nowadays I work in loneliness and its experiences in my life or in the life.
More often than not, “she is a she” is an idea, a true idea, to embrace the alone situation;
even though photographic act tends to be a solitary journey, I created She and being along her on the ride.
In this ride we go to the land, we experience my land, on the road or off the road;
and I make some shapes of being with a complicated mix of
wonderment and irony, delight and sadness, connection and isolation.
I think with myself, at the end and for our faith,
Little Princes come back to the earth for new rides…
* “You are not created nonsense” is the first line of a poem by Ahmad Shamlou,and it’s important that, the Persian poem traced me but the translated lines are only sentences.
