I am a visual artist, researcher, and educator, and my artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of alternative photography, printmaking, artists’ books, and experimental moving image. In my work, I employ processes such as cyanotype, chemigram, lumen print, image transfer, handmade filmmaking techniques, and interventions in archival images in order to explore the unstable relationship between image, memory, and disappearance.
A significant part of my work is focused on the concepts of the archive, trace, and index, as well as various forms of image erasure. Drawing on the thought of philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Georges Didi-Huberman, I understand the image as a site in which presence and absence are in constant negotiation. Through working with faded photographs, damaged negatives, light-sensitive materials, and chemical reactions, I address the questions of how images persist, how they decay, and how they return in the form of fragmentary narratives of individual and collective memory.
In recent years, my research and projects have increasingly focused on the politics of visibility, the body as archive, and the relationship between text and image. In many of my works, I use found photographs, personal archives, handwritten notes, and everyday documents in order to investigate the mechanisms through which memory is formed, transmitted, and reproduced. The material vulnerability of the image surface—from fading and staining to corrosion and erosion—is in my practice not merely an aesthetic choice, but a way of thinking about time, loss, and historical rupture.
Alongside my artistic practice, I am the founder and director of the Khanesh Cultural and Artistic Institute, an independent space dedicated to creative nonfiction, essay film, archival practices, and interdisciplinary research. Within this institution, I have designed numerous educational programs and projects that bring together writers, filmmakers, visual artists, and researchers around themes such as memory, personal narrative, testimony, and the archive.
I am also the founder of the Handmade Film School, where I engage in educational design and conduct workshops on alternative printmaking, camera-less filmmaking, manipulation of archival images, and experimental image techniques. For me, teaching is an inseparable part of the artistic process and an attempt to preserve and expand analog and handcrafted modes of image production.
My academic background is in Persian Language and Literature, studied at Alzahra University and Allameh Tabataba’i University. This literary background has led many of my projects to unfold in dialogue with poetry, philosophy, myth, and essayistic writing. For me, the image is not a fixed document, but a field of play for interpretation, memory, and imagination.
My recent projects engage with inherited memory, the afterlife of photographic archives, and the representation of the body within cultural and political systems of visibility and prohibition. Through printmaking, film, installation, and artists’ books, I seek to create spaces in which image, material, and narrative encounter one another in states of suspension, transformation, and becoming.