My Heart Is Tight For You
Easthampton City Arts, Easthampton, MA
September 5 - September 30, 2026
Easthampton City Arts, Easthampton, MA
September 5 - September 30, 2026
My practice explores the ways memory, identity, and belonging are carried across distance. Working between photography, installation, video, and objects, I often begin with materials rooted in my everyday life like family photographs, textiles, kitchen tools, handwritten notes, spices, and objects made by my parents. These seemingly ordinary things become vessels for memory, holding traces of a home, a relationship, or a way of life that can no longer be physically inhabited in the same way.
As an Iranian artist living in the diaspora, I am interested in what happens to home when it becomes a place we carry rather than a place we occupy. Distance transforms familiar objects. A piece of fabric becomes an archive; a handwritten label becomes a record of care; a wooden spoon becomes a gesture of love; a domestic object becomes evidence of histories that might otherwise remain unseen. Through collecting, reusing, transferring, imprinting, and recontextualizing these materials, I examine how personal memory can become a form of cultural preservation.
My work is also shaped by the experiences of Iranian women and the inherited expectations surrounding womanhood, domesticity, and care. I am interested in the tension between tenderness and control, how love and protection can coexist with social structures that restrict women, and how traditions passed down through generations can carry both intimacy and oppression. Domestic spaces become sites where these contradictions are particularly visible: places of nourishment, creativity, and belonging, but also places where prescribed roles have historically been reinforced.
At the center of this work is my relationship with my family. Rather than presenting home only as a place I left behind, I consider it as something continually reconstructed through gestures, objects, memories, and inherited knowledge. The works move between absence and presence, separation and connection, oppression and resilience.
Ultimately, I see these materials not as remnants of a lost home, but as active carriers of memory. By bringing them into the gallery, I transform intimate fragments of family life into a shared space of remembrance where the personal can speak to larger questions of migration, cultural identity, womanhood, love, and belonging.
