Woven

Gazelle Samizay and I have been working together since 2016 after we met at the “Focus Iran 2” exhibition at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles. We discovered that the pieces we exhibited had similar themes and tones, speaking to the restrictions women in our home countries of Iran and Afghanistan experience, even after emigrating to the US. Initially, our collaboration began as supporting one another in our individual projects and shooting commercial photo assignments together. As we discovered common ground in our upbringings, we birthed a new collaborative video by the name of “Bepar (Hop).”  

In “Bepar” a young woman relives the personal struggles of her past, such as dysfunctional family relationships, marriage, war, intergenerational trauma, and strict social expectations in a patriarchal society via the global game of hopscotch (called "lay lay" in Iran and "joz baazi" in Afghanistan). We are interested in the way cultural expectations and the effects of war transcend borders and affect women despite their location. Building upon the video, we manipulate photographs into layered or 3D forms, a new process of experimentation in both of our practices. The collages are experiential—the viewer discovers different details depending on the viewing angle. This resists a facile consumption of our identities, thus challenging stereotypes of Middle Eastern women.  

The act of simultaneously hiding and revealing represents the ways women in our culture subtly exert agency while maintaining family harmony. In some instances, the images look diseased, distended from the internal pressure of silenced female voices and trauma. The multitude of elements in each piece reflects the confusion and conflict we feel as citizens of the U.S., a nation that inflicts violence on our home countries in the form of war, occupation and economic sanctions. We reenact this violence on the photographs and materials themselves, dissecting, crushing and reconfiguring past experiences into creative expression. Bodies are fragmented and images are repeated by re-photographing prints in different formations, reflecting the transmutation of memory and trauma. Through this process we gain a better understanding of one another as women from sister countries, while exercising power in the way we know how, as immigrant artists living in the land of our colonizer.