unwarranted letters (2023-24)

Interactive Lighting/painting Installation

Unwarranted Letters is a project to further develop my concept installation, (dis)appearance by using lighting and paint to convey the ideas of enforced censorship, optical illusion, and living inside and outside of authoritarian regimes such as Iran.

Over the course of this 6 months long project, I wrote letters to my friends who were/ and to this day still are in prison in Iran for raising their voice against tyranny and fascism. As well as those who I can not talk to for fear of them getting arrested by the regime. With the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution that happened in Iran, people inside just like always were fighting with their lives on the line, and the diaspora outside of Iran were actively trying to come up with ideas to help those that were on the streets back home. A pattern that has been apparent in all the uprisings and revolutions that has happened, regardless of which country it is.

These letters were about revolution, uncertainty, alienation, belonging, love, hate, authoritarianism, melancholia, memory, wounds, and the process of healing - if there is any. These letters were handwritten by myself in Farsi and English all over the walls of a studio here in Toronto (The Bridge), and were never read by those that it is addressed to.

The letters on the walls of the studio were hand written in Green Red or White (colours of Iran’s flag). With RGB lighting installed in the ceiling, I ran a sequence of lighting in which the lights changed from red to green to blue randomly. When the room lighting was red, the parts of the walls that were painted green disappeared and turned black and were not seen by the audience. When the lighting was green, then the parts of the room that were in red disappeared and only the green/white parts became visible. Through this installation, I made and attempt to engage in the complexities taking place between the activist and the erasure/silencing forces in power. I actively chose what to conceal and what to reveal under the different lighting in the room. Parts of the walls were never visible under that lighting condition, parts of it were visible in a short period and parts of it were always visible under any lighting.

This is a tribute to all the lives and time that we (as Iranians) have lost over the years of living under/outside an authoritarian regime and in exile.