I study how legibility is produced, who it serves, and how artists turn its failure into method. I am drawn to artists who treat language as material and material as language, and who locate truth in objects, surfaces, and noise when documents give out.
I am an artist and scholar based in Rochester, New York, where I am pursuing a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Born in Tehran, I hold an M.F.A. in Photography and Related Media from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a B.A. in Photography from Tehran University of Art.
My current line of questioning concerns making as an archival practice in its own right. I ask how the bodily intelligence of craft constitutes a record that no document can transcribe, and how the artist can act as an agent of historical reconstruction, reading absence through reenactment: reweaving, reprinting, retracing what the archive holds only as a gap.
My studio practice and my scholarship think through each other. Working across photography, fabric, video, and the artist’s book, I treat images as tactile, mutable objects where vision and touch meet, and I approach making as my primary mode of inquiry. The artist’s book matters to me as a malleable archival form as it enters institutional memory; each edition is a new iteration and a response to the one before it. My books are held in special collections including the University of Arizona, Tufts University, Wesleyan University, the University of Iowa, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, and the Savannah College of Art and Design.
My work has been exhibited and screened internationally, sometimes in places I could not physically reach, including Bucharest Pride, GRRL HAUS CINEMA in Berlin, and the Tropic Bound book fair, and has been featured in Photography+ (Photoworks, UK), PhMuseum, and IMA Magazine in Japan.
The latest:
My video poem SuSuZan was published in InVisible Culture, Issue 40: Diffraction.
Beginning in summer 2027, I join the Stanley Museum of Art at the University of Iowa for a residency in South Asian modern and contemporary art, cataloging a major recent donation of around 300 prints, including works by K.G. Subramanyan, Ramkinkar Baij, Bhupen Khakhar, and Haren Das, and contributing to a related exhibition.
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