I’m not even sure if the binary between figuration and abstraction is still central to contemporary painting discourse. Like many binaries, it feels somewhat outdated to me, too rigid for how images actually operate today.

In my practice, I don’t really think through that lens. I’m more interested in questions of legibility, and in how perception actually unfolds. I’ve been thinking a lot about how viewers experience the same phenomenon in varied ways, and how perception is always shaped by memory, experience, and position. That’s also what draws me to cognitive science.

I usually start with drawing from an immediate imagination that is still recognizable, something grounded in a definable phenomenon. But through the process of re-sketching and reworking, the form begins to step back. Sometimes I feel like these forms are a bit shy, not fully willing to reveal themselves to the viewer. Other times, they seem more reserved, holding back from showing their complete profile.

They are fully characterized, but still withheld. So, the process of transforming them becomes a kind of coding process. I’m almost programming the image, adjusting, translating, and reconfiguring it, so that its legibility is constantly being calibrated.

Some parts remain readable, others become more ambiguous. I come from a long-term practice in Tehran, where strategies like secrecy, deviation, negation, and disorientation have become foundational within artistic practice. So, the image is never fully fixed; it’s always somewhere between being recognized and being undefinable.

Over time, this process has developed into its own visual lexicon of forms, colors, and compositions that I’ve been building over the past years. And when I look back at my sketches, I start to notice relationships between them… They feel related, as if they share the same visual DNA, even when they diverge in form and meaning.

It operates as a kind of independent zone, a space deliberately set apart from the conditions of the world as we know it. The grid entered my work as a way to establish that separation, allowing me to suspend the assumptions we unconsciously apply when constructing a painting. For example, we perceive the world through gravity, oriented from top to bottom. We don’t experience it in reverse, or without that force, yet that conditioning still informs how an image is built, often without our awareness.

I wanted to become conscious of this and to detach from those embedded structures. At that time, I was repeatedly painting grids in oil as a way to reset that relationship and to rely instead on the internal logic of the medium, on the surface as a ground, its material conditions and structural organization, the basis on which painting is constructed.

What was at stake for me, particularly around 2020, was the need to construct a space of agency. At that time, progressive feminist discourse was active in Tehran, and through those personal, social, and political experiences, both the desire for and recognition of agency developed in me. The image, in turn, became a field where that agency could be reconfigured.

The grid provided a form of agency I was seeking. It was both constraining and enabling, and that tension became important for how I understood the work.

I found myself in an ongoing, imagined dialogue with Rosalind Krauss around my reading of her essay, what resonated, and where I diverged.

Over time, that need has shifted. The large, flat green surface of the canvas now performs a similar role to the grid. At that moment, it was necessary to step outside the given conditions of the world in order to establish a different set of possibilities, even if they still appear structured or constrained.

The body has always been central to my practice. Whether through choreographed improvisation, professional mountain climbing, yoga, or painting, I have been consistently engaged with the body and its relationship to the mind. What interests me is not only movement, but the awareness of the body in motion, its limits, its tensions, and the dynamic states that emerge in between.

I’m particularly drawn to how far the body’s capacity can be extended. Practices like mountain climbing and Ashtanga yoga have been ways for me to test those thresholds, to understand endurance, control, and the point at which the body begins to shift into something else.

When it comes to painting, I think of the surface as a bodily field. My interaction with it becomes a kind of performative exchange. In that sense, the act of painting is not separate from the body but continuous with it. Forms begin to emerge that resemble fragments or organ-like structures, almost as if they are actors on a stage. They are often deformed or displaced, creating a sense of tension and, at times, the uncanny.

When I left Tehran to continue my education in the U.S., I had been shaped by a context in which feminist discourse was actively present. I was closely attentive to social and political conditions, and over time, that awareness found its way into my studio practice.

I think that state of attentiveness and the broader dynamism of that environment became embedded in how I approach making. My education in Tehran was grounded in rigorous discipline, with a strong emphasis on art history and a deep engagement with the medium itself. That combination of critical awareness and formal training allowed me to develop my visual language within a context that was both intellectually and materially demanding.

Not really. I don’t have an affective attachment to any particular color. In my work, color is selected and deployed as a functional variable within a perceptual and semiotic system. If it does not contribute to the structure of the image or its meaning, its legibility, differentiation, defamiliarization, or relational tension, I remove it. I’m not interested in color as a purely aesthetic element.

I think of color as a calibrated agent within the pictorial field. It can operate indexically, depending on how it is positioned in relation to form and context. My decisions are informed by how perception is processed, how recognition is triggered, and how meaning is constructed through visual cues.

For example, a specific blue can function as a cue for a wave, activating a familiar visual memory and supporting recognition. But if the form is already sufficiently legible, I may shift the color to disrupt that association, slowing down recognition and recalibrating the viewer’s perceptual response. In that sense, color operates as a variable within a system of signs, modulating how quickly an image is read, how stable its meaning becomes, and how the viewer moves between recognition and ambiguity.

No, definitely not, although that may be the most accessible way to read the work. It actually emerges from an ongoing dialogue with photographic discourse. Since around 2014, I’ve been in continuous conversation with a photographer and art historian colleague, and through those exchanges my attention shifted toward how form is presented in front of the lens, how it is clarified, but also how it can be obscured by the very conditions of visibility, such as light, exposure, or flash.

I became interested in how photography constructs visibility, and how that construction can also disrupt perception. I carried those concerns into painting, perhaps unconsciously, translating them into a different language. At the same time, I was teaching modern art history and looking closely at how the edge has evolved since Impressionism, how it has been transformed, and how it carries meaning.

I was aware that my images carry a degree of illegibility, and I wanted to work with that, to sustain a certain tension, even a sense of the uncanny. For that, I relied on a very precise and controlled clarity in the articulation of form, almost as a counterbalance.

At times, it can be frustrating when these sensitivities are overlooked and the work is read primarily as graphic or image-driven.

Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking about how a single work can function on its own, while also operating as part of a larger sequence. So I tend to think less in terms of isolated images, and more as a spatial and temporal experience.

Each work has its own internal logic, but once installed, they begin to interact with one another. The exhibition becomes a kind of spatial sequence, where meaning unfolds through the overall experience and the transitions that occur as the viewer moves through it.

I’m interested in how a visual language operates within a single frame, and then expands across the whole show, almost like a shift from shot to sequence. In that sense, the space becomes the site of encounter, an event that unfolds over time.

Clearly, this idea emerged for me in reverse. The move away from a single viewpoint in art, formally, avoiding the repetition of fixed visual solutions within an image or across a body of work, developed alongside my observation of the persistent presence of authority, particularly within feminist discourse.

Rather than fixing a single position, I understand perception as something that can rotate. Shifting the lens allows a phenomenon to be approached from multiple viewpoints, not to stabilize meaning, but to come closer to its complexity, even if its essence remains ultimately inaccessible.

This condition has been further intensified through the experience of migration, which opens a space for questioning and multiplicity. As the Iranian anthropologist Shahram Khosravi, drawing on Edward Said, describes it, this is a form of “contrapuntal consciousness”: the ability to hold multiple histories and perspectives at once. This deeply resonates with me...

I’m open to different styles, but I avoid music that puts me into a repetitive or predictable rhythm. It starts to influence the work in a way I don’t want. That’s why I return to jazz, especially the kind that disrupts rhythm and keeps me alert.

I also avoid anything too meditative. It can place me in a comfort zone, and I don’t want that in the studio. I try to stay fully aware of what’s happening, and to keep moving away from previous visual solutions so I can take risks, make decisions, and find new directions.

I’ve been working on two new skills: silkscreen printing and cooking more intentionally. They feel surprisingly similar. I enjoy building recipes from a set of ingredients, and I’m curious how my friends experience those subtle shifts, whether they pick up on the small differences, haha.