Artist Statement
My practice explores how experiences of displacement reshape our relationship to belonging, memory, and intimacy. Painting is not simply a way of producing images for me, but a way of thinking through the emotional structures that connect people to places, objects, and one another. Rather than constructing fixed narratives, I create spaces where presence and absence, closeness and distance, remain in quiet tension.
My series Orbital was inspired by the novel of the same name, in which astronauts observe the Earth from orbit. What interested me was not outer space itself, but the shift in perspective: how distance transforms perception. I developed this body of work while living in Iran, yet it was first exhibited in Berlin. The geographical distance between the place where the works were made and the place where they were first encountered became inseparable from their meaning—a reflection on borders, isolation, and belonging to a place before physically arriving there.
During this period, I began working with blanket fabrics as both material and companion. I carried several of these paintings with me across different cities and landscapes in Iran, wearing and transporting them almost like garments. I photographed them in natural environments, allowing wind, dust, sunlight, and the landscape itself to leave traces on their surfaces. These marks are not documentation of the work—they are part of the work. The fabric is not merely a support for painting; it is a body that travels, accumulates memory, and records the experience of moving through the world.
After immigrating to Germany, one of the simplest rituals of everyday life changed: eating. For the first time, I found myself sharing most meals only with myself. This experience transformed my understanding of the table. It became more than furniture; it became a space where time, conversation, care, and belonging are collectively performed. What had once been ordinary suddenly revealed itself as something fragile.
My recent series, I Am Leaving the Table, takes its title from a song by Leonard Cohen. For me, the title refers to the moment someone decides to leave the table—not only literally, but also metaphorically: leaving a relationship, a home, a country, or a sense of belonging. Leaving is rarely a single gesture. More often, it unfolds gradually, until presence quietly becomes memory.
Throughout my work, neither the blanket fabric nor the table functions simply as an object. Both act as vessels of memory: one carries the traces of the body, touch, travel, and time; the other preserves the presence of those who once gathered around it—or those who chose, or were forced, to leave. Rather than representing personal stories, my work asks how belonging is constructed, how it shifts, and what continues to remain with us after we have left.