My art practice is a mode of learning that revolves around scientific and philosophical investigations. The central part of my studio practice is exploring histories and performative aspects of materials such as casting, engraving, visual narratives, and choreography.
The crux of my work is speculations derived from decontextualized objects—considering their social context to their physical characteristics. The narratives are incorporated via object making with pragmatic approaches and perspectives that object to socio-political appropriation.
In resistance to such appropriate castings, I use these investigations to exhaust contextualized understanding of objects. I take their physicality, e.g., color, materiality, into juxtaposition, conjunction, composition, and abstraction. The outcome is a poetic assemblage that choreographs experiences of the object—the choreography whirls around semiotics and subjectivity of myself to explore frictions in what is known to me.
My most recent work, Kolompeh, is a site-responsive project about justice, in terms of proportionality and equity. A response to inclusiveness and fairness. The work consists of a dinner performance, Khalil, Kolompeh, and Preservation video piece.
The performance is a dinner that takes place in an art gallery with twelve chairs and a table. Khalil and his friends cook the dinner. The main meal is an Iranian cuisine accompanied by a traditional Kermani dessert, Kolompeh, and black tea.
Resisting commercializing liberal attitudes toward identity, I created an uninvited fictitious being, Khalil, a cat that cooked and served only for those that were sitting around the table fairly. Khalil, an Irani cat and not Persian, took copper fittings from the backyard of the Justice Hotel. The fittings were left in the garden when the hotel was in the renovation stage. Khalil brought them inside and prepared the dinner in twelve ceramic bowls. The bowl of lettuce, raspberry, pepitas, wheat, walnut, salt, and the copper fittings.
Sixty copper fittings are in shapes of 90 ° elbow, 45 ° elbow, tee, and adapter. They embody etching of animals, vegetables, and alphanumeric signs as veins of previous functors of the building which no longer fit.
The copper fittings were divided into twelve ceramic bowls randomly, which contextualizes them as a dinner meal in the performance.
Their peculiar visual characteristics can be divided, differently, into groups of گل, نظر , Cylinder Seal, Slot, Just Packed, Local Cat, Preserved. This idiosyncratic grouping posits a linear narrative of the video piece, Preservation.
Preservation is an 8:41 minute long video about the copper fittings being documented and preserved by paraffin wax. The video starts with a poem about infallibility, which I whispered into the ears of guest no. 7 and 8, during the performance. The background music is Mara Bebus, which has controversial backstories of its poet, Haydar Reqabi. It’s a weave of a loving story into political movements of the 60s of Tehran.
