Take Your Shoes Off Before Stepping onto the Persian Carpet
Medium: Acrylic, Oil Pastels and Color Pencil on Watercolor Scroll, View Master with Custom Image Reel, Cassette Tape and Player
This installation begins with an invitation. At the pedestal, a View-Master holds photographs of my most cherished memories of Iran. Beside it, a cassette tape player holds a mixtape of Persian songs beloved across the diaspora. Both are childhood artifacts that carry the sensory weight of home. These objects ask you to enter the gallery of my heart before you meet the scroll.
The 13-foot watercolor scroll began as a desire to create a physical animation, a piece whose story unfolds across time and space as the viewer moves through it. When war came to Iran, I covered the entire scroll in blue. I was drowning in anticipatory grief and survivor's guilt. After days of stillness, I put away every planned illustration and picked up a pen simply to draw.
What followed was automatic and intuitive. Each day I drew what felt right in that moment, like a journal entry. The repetition of returning to the scroll, surrendering to whatever my hand needed to make that day, became its own ritual of processing. A way of sitting with grief without being consumed by it. Slowly, it became a cathartic excavation of memory, longing, displacement, and love.
The scroll is framed as a Persian carpet: the place where we eat, sleep, gather, and pray. A carpet is a testament to Iran's rich cultural heritage, woven patiently, knot by knot, across millennia where each region and ethnic group weaved its own stories and landscapes into their distinctive design. As one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth, Persian culture has survived Mongol and Arab invasions, and European imperialism absorbing its conquerors cultures like a sponge toward Persian identity rather than surrendering its own. Here, the carpet becomes the ground on which all of this is held together.
Click this link to Continue listening to the Tape:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJqexC_6Gf55i9Mbj87NUyf2F53ONWXvC&si=yYk0z2IvTc4ibZBq
