04/17/2026
This body of work emerges from a disrupted sense of geography.
I was born during the Iran–Iraq war and grew up within its duration. Decades later, war has returned again, first briefly, and now as an ongoing condition. This is the third time I am encountering it, and the second time from a distance.
The distance is not stable.
I am physically located in New York, while my attention remains elsewhere—fixed on a city I know intimately, yet can no longer fully recognize. Streets, homes, and neighborhoods appear altered, erased, or uncertain. Geography begins to lose its reliability.
What was once familiar no longer holds.
This condition produces a split spatial experience, being here and there simultaneously, without fully inhabiting either. The map no longer aligns with memory. The present interrupts the past, and both remain unresolved.
The materials are not separate from this condition.
All fabrics used in the work come from my own garments, materials that originate from Iran and carry the imprint of my body across distance. They are not neutral surfaces, but lived ones, marked by proximity, memory, and displacement.
Through acts of folding, holding, and stitching, the surface is interrupted and compressed, resisting the formation of a stable image.
The fabric becomes a site where geography is no longer mapped, but folded, where distance, memory, and uncertainty are held in tension.
Often, this process unfolds alongside my mother. While I work with the sewing machine, she stitches by hand. Our shared labor becomes a quiet structure for holding time and distance together.
These works are not images of place.
They are material conditions of dislocated geography, where recognition fails, and orientation cannot be secured.
This work remains within that time.
