I am an Iranian-born artist living in London. I am always on the move; moving through time and spaces of body & mind. Making art is for me an attempt to stay in the here & now: a vital practice to maintain stability, calm, and fluidity in daily life. Making art is for me like belonging to a place, having a home; a space I can connect to the most genuine of myself and my immediate existence.

 

I was born in Tehran Iran in the beginning of 1960s. I come from a middle-class family. My father was an educator and my mother was bitter about not being allowed to finish her schooling by her own father due to some cultural or religious beliefs. As most middle-class families in Iran my parents saw having a higher education and having a respectable job for their children as the key for them to be integrated and also to have a dignified life reflecting their beliefs and ideals. I was pretty good at school in most subjects including arts with not doing much effort. We didn’t have arts as a subject in secondary school. 

Although becoming increasingly wild and rebellious during my secondary school years, I guess deep down like any child growing up in a big family, I also unconsciously wanted to impress and please my parents in some positive ways. However, I happened to go through the Iranian revolution in 1978/79 while still in secondary school, which I believe affected my life enormously. By the time I completed high school aged 18 (something some of my friends were not lucky enough to do due to the political circumstances) the universities in Iran were shut down nationwide to go through the so-called Cultural Revolution to bring it in line with Islamic government. The Iran/Iraq war just began but it didn’t affect Tehran as much that time. 

So, I had  to see what I can do with my life. I started doing some jobs till I did a short training as a construction drawer and started working in a small architecture firm for a few years. It was there when I decided to study architecture. Hence once the universities opened again in Iran a few years later I did the entrance exam for architecture in 1984. By the time I received a positive response to my application, I was already in West Germany on the wish of my parents to escape the circumstances in Iran. 

Finding myself in a country I spoke no words of their language,  and maybe feeling rejected by my family and being left on my own devices, my priorities that time had changed from, ‘what I really wanted to do’ to ‘what I believed I needed to do in order to survive, and also - most importantly for me - to secure my independence as an Iranian woman’. Hence, I followed maybe the unspoken wish of my parents and studied medicine. I reached my goal to be an independent woman, but I was living mostly in my head and something was always missing. So, it took me years  of hard work and courage to find my way back to my artist self again and find my artist identity. Now I can not even imagine living without it.

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