Interdisciplinary Performance and Media Artist Based in Tehran, Iran
My work explores the body as an archive through long-duration performance and digital media installation, engaging intergenerational history and memory, collective trauma in society, political erasure, and forms of feminine resistance. Grounded in time-based practices, my performances investigate how gesture, endurance, and mediated environments carry suppressed histories and lived experiences across generations.
“I Am a Citizen of the Earth” Performance
Performance Description:
“I Am a Citizen of the Earth” is an interactive performance exploring feminine resistance and the urgent desire for peace amid war, crisis, and global disaster.
The performer enacts a symbolic act of giving birth to peace, using the body as a site of vulnerability and defiance.
Throughout the performance, the only spoken word is “peace”—expressed in different emotional states, from desperation to hope.
Around the performer, bottles filled with red pigment represent violence and collective injury; audiences may choose to throw these bottles, pause, or continue—becoming active participants in cycles of harm and collective decision-making.
The work questions borders, power, and the illusion of superiority that fuels human conflict.
Conceptual Text:
People are unwell…
The Earth is unwell…
Human deaths now come from human-made disasters…
A father in war kills another father…
A spouse in war kills someone’s child…
All humans are someone’s mother, child, father, spouse, or friend, and no one is superior to another…
The reason for killing or oppressing another is nothing but an illusion…
My country is the Earth…
And I am a citizen of the world…
“Borders were defined by others.”
"Here" Performance
Here is a participatory performance examining trauma exchange, gendered labels, and the social, cultural, and religious pressures placed on individuals. Four performers exchange garments to step into each other’s shoes, using movement to explore how imposed labels shift, weigh on the body, and find moments of relief through collective action. A sound collage composed from the performers’ recorded real-life reflections accompanied the performance and is available on the website after the images. Presented within Nicholas Vergette’s installation, the work combines verbal and non-verbal interaction to highlight how societal expectations shape and restrict embodied experience.
Our Echo is an experimental video and sound work exploring mirrors as symbols of connection and shared human origins. Informed by the idea of mirror neurons, the piece considers how empathy and resonance move between people much like shared strands of DNA. The sound incorporates the word mother in several linguistically related languages, revealing hidden links across cultures. Though not always visible, the mirror’s presence shapes the work’s structure and extends ideas from a related performance. Our Echo was presented at the Translations: Creative Research in the Media Arts event at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
"The Other" Performance
The Other is an unscripted mirror-based performance presented at MoMA, using reflection and direct encounter to question the boundary between self and other. Wearing a garment covered in mirrors, I moved through public spaces and invited viewers to see fragments of themselves and their surroundings reflected back. Informed by ideas from Said, Sartre, and Joan Jonas, the work considers how political, gendered, and geographical notions of “otherness” shape perception. The shifting reflections created brief, silent exchanges that opened space for empathy and shared presence. Through this simple walk, the piece challenged the distance we maintain in urban environments and the fragile boundaries that divide us.
"Saba Packed Her Possessions" Sound Track
Saba Packed Her Possessions is an experimental video and sound work about displacement,
memory, and the emotional weight of living between geographies. Centered on the act of packing as an
archive of migration, the piece explores how objects hold identity, loss, and transition. The audio—
composed, sung, and produced by me; uses whispered, layered vocals to reflect the fractured temporality
between Iran and the United States.
How long must the women of my land sing a lullaby for Iran?
A land of poetry turned into blood.
America at night, Iran in the morning.
America in the morning, Iran at night.
And I, caught between time and memories,
My hair entwined with the wind, rain, and soil…
I will free you with my hair.
"Crustose, گلسنگ" Performance
Crustose is a performance that uses crustose lichens organisms so tightly bound to their surfaces they cannot be removed without damage as a metaphor for how ideology, collective trauma, displacement, and inherited histories adhere to the body across generations. Developed for SIU’s On Slippery Grounds (2025), the work examines the tension between ephemeral action and the permanence of social forces that shape the body and its strategies for survival. During the performance, audience responses to the question “What is the ideology that burdens you?” formed an immediate archive of shared pressures, showing how deeply embedded beliefs persist even within a transient, live encounter. Through movement, endurance, and relational exchange, Crustose reflects on how memory is carried, transmitted, and negotiated across time.
Video Performances Documentation
"God" & "Displacement" Video performances
God (balloon) and Displacement (mirror) were not created to stand as major works on their own; their significance lies in how they marked a crucial shift in my practice. These were my first solo performances, where I pushed my expression and physically challenged my body after years of cultural and gendered oppression that had restricted its visibility and movement. In God, the balloon becomes a temporary organ for breath and voice until it ruptures, exposing tension, fragility, and intensity. In Displacement, reversing the visibility of face and body reveals the paradoxes of constraint and freedom shaped by my past environment. Together, these works expanded my metaphorical vocabulary—balloon, mirror, and later foil and directly paved the way for the development of Crustose, where these ideas evolved into a deeper engagement with ideology, embodiment, and endurance.
"Elegy I,II,III"
The Elegy for Iran series expands the material vocabulary I began in God and Displacement, using foil, sound, charcoal, and hair as metaphors to examine petro-politics, gendered precarity, and the poetics of mourning. In Elegy I, aluminum foil shifts between hijab, a Pietà like form, death shroud, and reflective surface, while conflicting political news footage is video-collaged and projected onto my body, exposing the tension between mediated crisis and lived experience. Created during the war in Iran, Elegy II incorporates real wartime audio into a live video performance, confronting the urgency of violence and the fragility of daily life. In Elegy III, I mix charcoal with oil to evoke petroleum economies, using my hair as a tool of inscription transforming a gendered marker into an act of resistance, survival, and embodied writing. Together, the series traces how the body carries intergenerational memory and becomes a site where disappearance, pressure, and grief are continually re-formed.
"Elegy I"
"Elegy II"
"Elegy III"
"Elegy III"- Interdisciplinary Installation
Elegy III is an installation presented in the SIUC gallery, where an experimental video recorded in the south of Iran along the Persian Gulf is projected onto the same fabrics used in the Elegy III live performance. My hair becomes an organic brush, inscribing charcoal and-oil marks that reference petroleum economies and the political forces that rapidly reshape women’s lives. The layered fabrics hold these gestures as an archive, reflecting how environmental and political shifts inscribe themselves onto the feminine body, pressure its survival strategies, and alter its presence across generations. Through projection and material transformation, the installation turns the body into both witness and record bearing the weight of place, history, and continual change.
