A STRATEGY FOR SURVIVAL
This work grows from personal experiences and attentive encounters with my surroundings. Collected and photographed fragments of lived moments are revisited and connected, forming intimate narratives that echo inner states. The process itself acts as a quiet form of artistic therapy, revealing vulnerabilities and strengths.
When the idea for A Strategy for Survival emerged, I realized that my years of collecting what seemed useless or insignificant had never been arbitrary. These materials, objects, images, and papers that had survived abandonment—were, in fact, forms of presence: attempts to remain, to be remembered, and to resist erasure.
Collage Series / 2025
Fragments of images collected from magazines. I wander somewhere between the realms of reality and fantasy.
Veilworld
Medium: Hand Collage Year: 2025 Size: 11.4x8.7 in
Details
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Reverse Side
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Extention
This work explores new possibilities of space by layering separate moments into a single, continuous environment. The piece is built entirely from magazine imagery, and each component begins as a full magazine page.
The first image is flipped, and the balloon is introduced from a different source. The second image opens onto a cave-like interior, while the blue area at the bottom is actually the sky taken from the third photograph. That sky becomes a passage, carrying the eye forward, as if the space could extend toward infinity.
The movement feels endless, like wandering up and down these corridors without an exit, until a sudden interruption stops it. A red barrier formed from a Russian logo cuts across the flow, landing like an urgent newsflash that arrests the drift.
Details
Reverse Side
Medium: Hand Collage Year: 2025 Size: 35.8x7.5 in
This handmade collage is made from magazine images. A full-page spread forms the background, while every other element is cut from different magazines and reassembled by hand. As I moved through the pages, I searched for a thread that could connect the fragments into a coherent dream, a bridge between real life and fantasy. In this imagined world, people who once wandered the streets are placed into intimate and luminous spaces of their own.
The craft of imagination: half truth, half dream
In this piece, fragments from two different magazines and an embroidery book are combined. The layered composition uses tracing paper as a background and paper tape as the binding material.
The transparent surface invites attention to the reverse side of the artwork, where coincidences and hidden connections take place. Among the fragments appears the shadow of a man—one of the cut pieces left over from the process of another collage. The other portrait, by contrast, seems to be waiting for something to happen.
Paired with the image of flying parrots, the figure evokes a sense of a missing person, or a living grief: absence and presence existing at the same time. The parrots fly within his chest, even though he himself is no longer there. Fragments of text taken from the magazines refer to strategies for survival, appearing as coded messages within the composition.
Details
Reverse Side
Medium: Hand Collage Year: 2025 Size: 11.4x8.7 in
A Figure Missing
Medium: Hand Collage Year: 2025 Size: 11.4x8.7 in
Reverse Side
This collage is assembled from Tehran Daily newspaper and serves as the culminating work in the A Strategy for Survival series, where public power, propaganda, and bureaucracy collide with childhood, identity fragments, and everyday repair.
Farsi headlines such as «آغاز ماجرا» (the beginning of the story), «چهرهٔ ریال» (the face of the rial), «دلار فرشته نجات» (Dollar, the angel of salvation), and «زنجیرهٔ دروغ» (chain of lies) sit beside public figures, echoing the contradictions and pressures Iranians have lived with for decades, from hyperinflation to war and emigration. These public narratives are interrupted by my personal portraits and documents beneath phrases like «مقاومت» (resistance) and «واقعاً ارزش را داشت؟» (was it really worth it?). My national ID is cut into fragments, and its punched holes are placed with precision to reveal words embedded in the newspaper itself, such as «افکار» (thoughts) and «نام پدر» (Father’s name), assembling a layered and granular universe where personal and collective histories unfold in parallel.
For young Iranians, formative years unfold in transition and suspension, as stability and meeting their bare minimum needs remains uncertain. In that constant churn of crisis, endurance becomes creative, and survival becomes a strategy remade again and again.
Preserved junk / News Papers
Medium: Hand Collage Year: 2025 Size: 15x13 in
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Reverse Side
This work is executed on a cut newspaper fragment placed at the center of a red foreground, bearing the Farsi word “جوان” (“young”; pronounced jah-VAHN), written in reverse. The cut and punched image of adulthood is now caught in a state of struggle and movement in the peak of youth. It appears as if, from behind the image, a hand is attempting to shift the red wall and reclaim a face emptied of meaning. It appears as if, from behind the image, a hand is attempting to shift the red wall and reclaim a face emptied of meaning. Adhesive fills the area of the removed mouth, which is repositioned outside the face.
“جوان” - Newspaper Fragments
Medium: Hand Collage Year: 2025 Size: 4x2 in
Reverse Side
Rations of Paper Memories: Coupon Series
Slides 4–7 form a mini-series that reframes my life in Tehran, through the frame of ration coupons as the primary ground of each collage. Issued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they regulated access to basic necessities and became instruments of survival amid recurring economic crises. Their printed design bears official markers of place and authority, including “Tehran” in Farsi (تهران) and state text naming the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Ministry of Commerce (وزارت بازرگانی). These coupons are drawn from my father’s archive.
In this piece, my childhood portrait is layered beneath a red translucent overlay that casts a shadow echoing the Shahyad (Azadi) Tower, Tehran’s emblem of freedom and the central motif of the coupon. Through a series of delicate incisions, the shadow is subtly carried through to the reverse side. Here, my face is no longer in hiding; it stands within the city, as a witness.
Medium: Hand Collage Year: 2025 Size: 3x2 in
Reverse Side
Unlike the previous piece, the child’s image is absent here. Instead, I cut away the section of the coupon centered on the Shahyad (Azadi) Tower and replaced it with a photograph of my eye from adolescence, set beneath a red translucent acetate overlay, precisely incised to fit.
By positioning the eye at the center of the composition, I place myself solely in the role of a witness, shifting the work from childhood presence to sustained, adult observation shaped by a different lived experience.
Medium: Hand Collage Year: 2025 Size: 3x2 in
Reverse Side
The work combines the coupon with a word cut from a newspaper.The eyes are no longer present to witness. Instead, the mouth remains, allowing only a single word to be spoken: the Farsi word «اصلاح» (eslâh; “reform/correction,” pronounced ess-LAH), placed at the center of my adult portrait in place of the face. The child from the earlier works has grown into adulthood, but not into fuller freedom. With the face removed, personhood fractures. The hijab layer tightens into a state-imposed veil, binding womanhood to a forced sign of identity and narrowing what can be seen, claimed, or spoken. It reflects a defining condition of women’s life and freedom in Iran.
From the right edge of the portrait, the word «اقتصادی» (eghtesâdi; “economic”) partially emerges.
Medium: Hand Collage Year: 2025 Size: 3x2 in
Reverse Side
Medium: Hand Collage Year: 2025 Size: 3x2 in
In this work, my adult photograph is collaged onto the coupon, but the figure’s identity is progressively dismantled. The body is cut away, leaving only a residual frame, a trace of what was once whole. Through that absence, the city becomes visible.
The eye, punched from the original photograph, is reinserted out of alignment, no longer occupying its correct position. For me, this displacement marks disorientation and a resulting numbness.
Preserved Junk / Tickets
Long Island Rail Road and Portrait
This piece layers my original portrait at age four, the age I remember as the peak of my vulnerability, with a Long Island Rail Road ticket from my return to the U.S. three years ago.
One eye peeks from below the word “ADULT,” evoking a lost yet persistent childhood.
The punched portion of the ticket extends beyond the surface like a translucent green path, suggesting light, movement, and the trajectory of life.
Archiving fragments like this ticket is a practice I learned from my father: each seemingly insignificant piece carries a story, and the passage of time only adds to its value.
Reverse Side
Medium: Hand Collage Year: 2025 Size: 7×2 in
The core materials of this series consist of tickets, boarding passes, and related documentary artifacts.
Reverse Side
Digital Collage series / 2025
The Life Within Layers
The photos I captured of artworks and spaces, carrying the memories of moments once lived, now form a web of interconnected experiences that continue to resonate within me.
Dreamscapes Assembled
Images that once touched me, captured and left behind, now reshaped into enduring narratives.
Absence Embodied
Inspired by “Mourning Diary” by Roland Barthes, this work combines fragments of that text with photographs I took of artworks and of my wandering through Tehran, including elements from Bahman Mohasses’ work, transforming the abstract experience of loss into something tangible and deeply felt.
The Day We Saw Spring
This work combines photographs I took, excerpts from a book reflecting resilience (“Through everything, we keep living and making”), and a fragment of Qasem Hajizadeh’s painting. It captures the fleeting wonder of stepping outside after quarantine, suddenly encountering wisteria in bloom that sprouted while we were confined, alongside friends’ bittersweet laughter during a boat ride, reflecting the mix of loss and fleeting joy in that moment, and the continuation of life after a period of pause.
Though I Will Fade
This work was created in order not to be forgotten, and the entire concept revolves around this idea of leaving traces, preserving memories, and confronting the inevitability of fading.
All the photos in this work were captured at pivotal moments in my life. Many were taken just days after my father’s passing, in one of my favorite spaces in the city. While delivering his photos for framing, I unexpectedly encountered images of him displayed on the walls of a private workshop I had never been allowed to enter. Seeing him there—through the eyes of his close friend—was one of the most profound moments of my life. I made no manual edits to the photos aside from a color filter; their arrangement and reflections on the walls give the impression of fading, echoing both presence and impermanence.
Return to Phantom Spaces
Spaces once inhabited and photographed, now woven into a reality that never truly existed.
After the Fall
Capturing a fleeting moment of solace that rescued me from grief, this work combines fragments of a Belgian collage artist’s creation, passages of text, and my own photographs, embodying a conscious effort to remain and move forward after loss.