On rooms, and who is in them

Every place we live in becomes a container for our identity, our routines, and the cultural habits we carry with us. My studio practice, shaped by relocation and adaptation, focuses on the relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit, and on how an environment can carry identity, presence, and absence. After moving from Iran to the United States, I became interested in how rooms retain the marks of the people in them. Spending most of my days in a small studio apartment, I came to see that every place holds its inhabitants and the traces of both their presence and their absence.

To work through these questions I use a set of recurring visual devices. Mirrors and reflective surfaces appear throughout the work as a way of questioning self-perception. In recent paintings such as Neither One, Nor Many and Distorted to You, mirrors multiply and distort the figure, which emphasises how partial and mediated our sense of ourselves is. Light vs. Shadow works differently, holding the stillness of a single moment in which light and shadow become the only form of presence.

The Residential Complex series was made in response to the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran and formed my MA thesis collection. Each painting shows one apartment interior, and the paintings are installed together as a single structure. Seen as a group, they resist the flattened picture of Iranian society that circulates abroad, because the evidence of difference is right there in the furniture, the lighting, and the choices each household made. My MA thesis concerned the relationship between titles and images, so I also use titles as a second layer of meaning, guiding a reading without closing it.

The work addresses displacement, identity, and cultural difference through contemporary figurative painting. I am interested in how domestic interiors register experiences of transition and adaptation, and I draw on Edward Hopper's use of dramatic light to turn ordinary rooms into scenes of psychological tension.

I intend to extend this inquiry into the study of human-environment relationships, and to keep asking how domestic space can articulate displacement, belonging, and coexistence in a country as culturally mixed as the United States.