What were some of your early creative influences?

My earliest influences included contemporary artists such as Vanessa Beecroft and Shirin Neshat, whose approaches to performance, the female body and cultural identity deeply shaped my thinking. I was also inspired by European masters like Amedeo Modigliani and Alberto Giacometti, and by Persian poets including Forough Farrokhzad and Sadegh Hedayat. Their emotional depth, sense of vulnerability and explorations of identity have stayed with me throughout my practice.

These influences continue to appear in works such as Erasure (2010), where I reference Farrokhzad by writing and erasing her poetry Rebirth. In Restless (2015), a paragraph from Hedayat about masks and hidden identities is read in multiple languages. My performance Women in Shadow (2011, 2018) also reflects the visual and conceptual inspirations I draw from both Beecroft and Neshat. Across my practice, their impact can be seen in my ongoing focus on double identity, visibility, and the tension between what is revealed and what is concealed.

What ideas, experiences or themes do you return to in your work?

Across my practice, I return to themes shaped by my lived experience as an Iranian-born Australian woman – my first twenty years in Iran and the rest in Australia. Since moving here in 2009, photography and video have become central to my work, and the contrast between growing up under suppression in Iran and now creating freely in Australia continues to inform my narrative. I frequently explore double identity, displacement, cultural bipolarity, and the tension between relief and restriction.
The emotional and cultural contrasts between my life in Iran and my life in Australia remain fundamental. My work often seeks to build a bridge between East and West, between my past and my present. And yet the more I try to escape or erase my past, the more it reappears in my work.

What have been some of your favourite career experiences?

One of the most significant breakthroughs came shortly after I moved to Australia in 2009. In Iran, I had been a painter and drawer focusing on nude female bodies—work I was never allowed to exhibit. When I arrived in Australia, I was taken to Maslin Beach, a nude beach in South Australia, with the idea that I could finally draw freely. Instead, that moment became a turning point. After years of censorship, I suddenly found myself in a place where nudity was permitted, yet I instinctively felt the need to cover myself. This contradiction pushed me toward photography and video, exploring self-censorship and concealment in a free country.

The first photograph I ever took – Image of Liberation (2010) – emerged from this experience and remains my most published work. That moment of cultural shock was also a creative pivot that reshaped my entire practice. Another breakthrough came during COVID, when I began working with glass – a medium I’d never imagined using. I revisited the historical tradition of tear collectors used by women in 17th-century Persia and reimagined them through a contemporary lens. What began as an experiment became a meaningful extension of my practice, and the work was received extremely well. Glass tear collectors have since become an ongoing part of my artistic journey.

Could you tell us about Forty Pages?

Forty Pages began from a place of pain, frustration and exhaustion. Between 2009 and 2015, I was exhibiting internationally while still travelling on an Iranian passport. The process was extremely difficult: visas, interrogations, long airport stops and the constant anxiety of being treated with suspicion. Every journey felt heavy. I wasn’t yet an Australian citizen and became acutely aware of how a single document could control your movement, your freedom, and even your sense of self.

When I finally became an Australian citizen in 2015, I felt compelled to close that chapter by transforming it into art. I used my old Iranian passport and its forty pages filled with stamps, marks and traces of those years of struggle. In the series, the accumulation of stamps becomes a form of scar tissue as I build them onto my face, layer by layer, until I no longer recognise myself.

The iconic portrait where I cover my face shows only Australian entry stamps – symbolising a new identity and a new sense of belonging. Half revealed, half obscured, it reflects the complexity of migration and living between cultures.

Ten years later, I see Forty Pages as an emotional and political self-portrait. It still resonates, especially as global borders and migration debates remain fraught. It reminds me how fragile—and powerful—identity documents can be. Today, I travel freely with my Australian passport, and physical stamps barely exist. The fact that the work continues to speak to others shows that these struggles are not just personal, but global.

How does photography relate to your broader art practice?

Photography is deeply connected to all facets of my practice. The concept always comes first, and then the medium that feels most truthful brings it to life. Photography often becomes the primary form because it captures the immediacy of my emotional and lived experience, particularly through self-portraiture. Using myself as the subject allows me to express personal narratives in the most direct, honest way. But my ideas rarely feel complete in a single form. Video, performance and installation expand the narrative and add layers of meaning. Many works begin as photographs but find deeper resonance through movement, sound or the physical presence of the body.

Although self-portraiture is central, I also cast other models when needed. My very first subjects were my brother and sister, whose presence allowed me to explore identity and family history from different perspectives. In this way, photography becomes both foundation and connective tissue – an entry point that opens into performance, video and installation.

Could you tell us about your latest body of work, Unspoken Words?

Unspoken Words is a photography and video series developed over the past two years in response to witnessing global conflicts and the pressure around speaking – or staying silent. Today, no matter how you speak up, there are consequences; yet remaining silent creates an internal battle. This tension between expression and suppression became the emotional starting point for the work.

I began by reflecting on my own “unspoken words”, the things I carry but often cannot voice. From there, the work expanded into a broader meditation on collective silence, political pressure and the emotional weight of global crises. The melting blue ink in my hands and mouth – formed from an ice cube – became the central metaphor. Blue ink was the first ink I used as a child to learn to write, and it is also the ink used today to sign treaties and documents that govern nations. In the series, the ink represents the fragility of truth, the instability of speech, and the way words can be frozen, controlled or dissolved. Through this visual language, Unspoken Words explores the struggle between voice and silence, the personal and the political, and the weight of what we say and what we don’t.