Practice

My phone burns hot with 72,000 images and videos, overflowing its memory and disrupting its functionality. I keep pouring into this dying device, anticipating its eventual exclamation of “enough!”. My memory is flawed, and I can feel my childhood moments in Iran fading. I look at photographs over and over until they become stale, their familiarity somehow making the moments feel further away. Yet with 2TB of cloud storage, I continue. Constantly capturing. Ensuring the hoarding can continue long after the device itself gives up.

Painting is my attempt to interrupt this cycle.

I paint from photographs taken on my phone, slowing down these fragments of everyday life and trying to understand what drew me to them. What began as an impulse to document what was disappearing has gradually become an attempt to reconstruct what I have already lost. I am interested in what happens to an image as it moves between different forms and surfaces: from a moment in the world, to a photograph, to paint, to a wall, and sometimes back into an image again.

I often paint directly onto walls, allowing the surface and its surroundings to become part of the work. Traffic, birds, passing people, weather, texture and imperfections all enter the painting. The wall becomes a temporary surface that the painting briefly inhabits rather than owns. I often erase these works after documenting them, leaving only a photograph behind.

This movement between forms creates a kind of copy of a copy. Each transition introduces the possibility of loss, distortion and change. I am less interested in preserving an image than in what happens when it is allowed to transform.

My relationship to Tehran has shifted from observing its changes to participating in them. The city has become both subject and collaborator. Through painting, I move between preserving and letting go, accumulating images while trying to make sense of them one at a time.

Background

My practice is informed by my background in architecture, community organising, participatory design and social justice projects. I am interested in how personal and collective histories become embedded within places, and in how cities and identities are continually reshaped by migration, redevelopment and conflict.

I hold a BA in Architecture: Objects and Spaces from Central Saint Martins and an MA in Fine Art: Painting from Camberwell College of Arts, both within UAL.

Recent projects and exhibitions include Rich Mix Resonates: Mehfil – The Art of Resistance (2024), Copeland Gallery and OUTHOUSE Gallery.