Hesitation in Red (2025-26)
Presented at Kunshalle Bern, in the context of Cantonale (Bern, Jura), this series came together over the past year, during a time when I was living with a kind of quiet fear, something vague but constant, like waiting for an event I couldn’t define. I didn’t set out to paint that feeling, but looking back now, I believe it shaped how the working process unfolded. Each painting felt like a decision suspended. I kept asking myself whether to add something or leave it alone. That uncertainty became part of the image.
The world in these works shifts between something recognizably real and something harder to place. I don’t think of it as fantasy exactly, but some elements feel closer to memory, or to fragments of a cultural language. They are just there, in the tone, or in how the figures are treated. Hesitation in Red is not a narrative. It is not even a series in the conventional sense. It is a field of repetition and difference. A place where each decision—whether to mark, erase, or leave blank—reveals a moment of indecision. A kind of suspended intimacy with something that cannot be named.
(Play)ground (2024)
While creating these paintings, the artist was inspired by Eastern folklore, supernatural beliefs, and tales. She started working on a ten-meter-long painting, which led her to a process of creation through repetition. This repetition is depicted in the form of a loop; a circle of real and fantasy worlds. Through these repetitions, the border of the two universes starts to get blurred, which creates a state of phenomenological uncertainty. The second part of the project contains a set of portraits. This is the artist’s attempt to enter this new universe and try to take out all of these creatures to our side of reality, to reveal their identity, as if they exist and have names.
A Sip in Between (2023-24)
Imagine drinking a cup of peppermint tea. With every small sip, you end up in an imaginary journey through a land of fairies and jinns. This collection is a visual free-play between the actual everyday world and a world of fantasy; between “their”s and ours.
Watch Your Head (2019–22)
“W Y H” is the outcome of a three-year course of painting (2019–2022) through which I was trying to represent my observations of the world I live in. Self-isolated in a village in Iran, I started to make use of any accessible material to realize my thoughts about the events taking place out there in the world. After a certain period, I could vividly see a repetition in my paintings. I kept seemingly repeating the same object, but with each attempt, another layer of reality was unveiled. To me, repeating was not the reoccurrence of the same old thing but rather a way of refusing to let it stay as it was. This collection consists of more than 100 paintings, all mixed-media on paper and approximately 10x15cm.
To Stay (2018–19)
“To Stay” is a representation of shattered relationships between people after a trauma; people who have survived death and are waiting for death. A representation of the effort to make things work; standing in line to get to your turn and being still. The heart of surviving is the awareness of mortality, and the spirit of awareness is the hope for living.
