Self as Archive: Fragments in a Persian Mirror
“Exhibition View”
The Fifth Parallel Gallery, Regina, SK, Canada, April 2025
Self as Archive: Fragments in a Persian Mirror
Artist statement
This exhibition brings together a series of paintings, drawings, and a photographic intervention that reflect the ongoing transformation of my artistic practice—from classical academic realism to a more personal and symbolic language of self-representation. While rooted in the formal traditions of European and Persian painting, these works shift away from idealized figuration to engage with vulnerability, fragmentation, and the complexities of identity.
The concept of the “archive” in this exhibition is not limited to history or documentation—it is internal, embodied, and emotional. My self-portraits function as living records of memory, exile, and masculinity, each one layered with references to Iranian mythology, political turmoil, and personal loss. They are shaped by both the nostalgia of a homeland left behind and the reality of navigating new cultural geographies as an immigrant artist. In this mirror—fragmented, poetic, and sometimes distorted—I attempt to see myself more clearly, and to invite others to do the same.
Throughout the exhibition, the figure recurs: sometimes monumental, sometimes vulnerable, caught between action and reflection. Paintings such as Flames of Agency, The Second Skin, and I Dreamed of Bones explore the psychological weight of inherited roles and silenced histories. Others, like Weight of Ashes and Witness, address the quiet residue of trauma and the tension between presence and absence. The recurring motif of the body—masked, mirrored, wounded—becomes a site of negotiation between private memory and collective experience.
This exhibition also includes sketchbooks and a series of seventy small drawings that form an auxiliary archive. These works offer glimpses into my daily process, emotional states, and spontaneous gestures—revealing the raw foundation beneath the finished canvases. They are less about resolution and more about continuity, marking a passage through time, space, and transformation.
Self as Archive: Fragments in a Persian Mirror is a search for coherence amid dislocation. It is a visual testimony to the persistence of selfhood in the face of rupture, and to the possibility of art as both refuge and resistance. Through these works, I ask: How does one carry a homeland within the body? What does it mean to look at oneself through history’s broken mirror?
