+
Body sweat gathered from a worker at an undisclosed Shell oil rig west of Weatherford, Texas. Received in Terrell, Texas from a friend of a friend. Driven from Terrell to Fort Worth and then to Dallas on October 07 2012.

+

Oil placed in a essential oil warmer.

“We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn.”  From The Gods of the Copybook Headings poem by Rudyard Kipling.

<This proejct was a collaboration between Richie Budd and I. Special Thanks to Keivan.P. from Iran for all his help. Without him this project could not happen>.

To build a land; an imaginary home. To push the limits of real and unreal, memory and imagination, locality and universality, self censorship and self- exile, time and space.To put together my most vivid memories on flat planes or 3D cubes. Inside and outside the empty rooms, rooms without bodies, rooms left behind. To construct the remembered, missed, identical objects. Things I care for,love the most, miss the most… To put together every five sense of my body into one (“sight”) through text and animation. A reflection and presentation of emotional attachments. Collective and personal.

<I ask you to show me the view of Tehran from your Balcony. You look back into the monitor: “ But remember? It’s hard to breath here. Darkness hides it all.” You still showed me the lights, the beautiful lights of Tehran which I only started to dream of after I left>.

(This video is a documentation of my installation displayed at Oliver Francis Gallery/Dallas Bienalle in April 2012. It’s an extension of my 3D animation (The Romantic Self-Exiles I), and a physical representation of imagined, dreamed, romanticized, beautiful Tehran. Two of the videos were taken by myself from the streets of Tehran with my iphone during my visit in 2010, and the video of Lights of Tehran at night was taken by Mona Allahyari and Amir Shahryar Tavallali in 2012. The videos were projected through one projector on 20 cubes made from plexiglas, covering 4 walls of the gallery).

“Reading her Mother’s diary, one word-per-frame, under the lens of time accumulated since the time of it’s writing, and of her birth — the time of life. Virtual words, lifted off the page, wriggle like embryos under inquisitive gaze of an interlocutor to whom they are addressed, as if resisting to be born into the world in which war and cruelty are present. Released over the overlapping maps of Tehran and Dallas, they carry on their transmissions over time, in the presence of a reader, in the absence of the writer.” Sandra  Skurvida.

Over There Is Over Here explores the dialectics of time, space, real and unreal to define and critique the position of those who have left Iran in the last 4-5years in relation to current political prisoners in Iran. The project uses 3D animation and data glitch as a way to illustrate presence-less presence and to show the passage and collapse of the time. In my recent trip to Iran, I found a picture of political prisoners, which is at least 100years old. Looking at the prisoners chained to each other, I saw a tragic relationship between the past and the present of Iran; a shared pain from the same soul, generation after generation. In my animation, the concept of time is used as a non- linear and collapsed concept in which the past and present have come together in order to create an “unreal” reality. Through a self-reflexive narrator, Over There Is Over Here alternates between the literary definition of a third person narrator to my actual, physical “third person” role outside Iran as narrator of the story. The narrator explores my relationship with imprisoned friends and classmates. In this relationship, I am the outsider who will always fail to understand the reality of a prisoner’s life. The more I live outside Iran, the more I will forget details of the “reality” of life inside Iran. For these reasons, the animation is a deliberate mix of real and unreal, fake and genuine.

The governmental and social restrictions, when working as an artist with a politically and socially engaged practice in a country like Iran, equates to the restrictions one might put on herself even after immigration. In order to preserve myself the possibility of going back to iran without the risk of getting arrested, since 2007 to 2010, self-censorship continued to be part of the production and the post production of my work. The result of this challenge was a series of new media/art performances called “Tips on Censorship”.

The governmental and social restrictions, when working as an artist with a politically and socially engaged practice in a country like Iran, equates to the restrictions one might put on herself even after immigration. In order to preserve myself the possibility of going back to iran without the risk of getting arrested, since 2007 to 2010, self-censorship continued to be part of the production and the post production of my work. The result of this challenge was a series of new media/art performances called “The ministry of cultural enlightenment and propaganda”; a ministry that I created after months of research on censorship laws in the Iranian government constitution. In these performances I made my own laws and performed different video instructions on censorship as a way to address, explore, and criticize the laws on censorship and question not only why they existed but also the cyclical, generalized, and corrupted notion of these laws.

In Iran every aspect of our lives is controlled by the government, even the most personal issues. There is always a sense of being watched by surveillance cameras. Even when you are inside of your house, in a place where is normally known as our private sphere. Recursion imagines a society in which the human being is trusted and selfcontrolled. In which the belief in the good essence of human is the dominant philosophy of the society and the government. I celebrate this hope by being the only one “watching” myself.