YOUR WORK SITS AT THE INTERSECTION OF TEXTILE, ARCHITECTURE AND MEMORY. WHAT FIRST DREW YOU TOWARDS WEAVING AS YOUR ARTISTIC LANGUAGE?

Before tapestry, I spent years working as a graphic designer in a highly structured, formal environment. During a period of upheaval, after moving to another city, my life became spatially and professionally constrained. I felt an urgent need to break away from established rules and seek a medium that would allow a different way of thinking about material and time.

My encounter with tapestry opened that door. Weaving not only offered an unprecedented sense of focus and calm that I deeply needed in that turbulent time but also enabled me to step away from conventional techniques and engage with flexible, accessible materials. Playing with matter had always fascinated me. I even studied sculpture in high school.  What truly held me was the realization that tapestry could carry lived experience, memory, and contemporary ideas in ways my graphic design practice never had. Within months, it had taken over my entire studio, marking the beginning of a profound shift in my artistic practice.

TEXTILE TRADITIONS OCCUPY A SPECIAL PLACE IN IRANIAN CULTURE. WHAT KINDS OF MEMORIES OR STORIES FROM YOUR OWN LIFE CONTINUE TO INFLUENCE YOUR PRACTICE TODAY?

In Iranian culture, textiles go far beyond functional objects: they are part of family and cultural memory, passed down from generation to generation. Usually, a piece of fabric, a prayer mat, or a carpet would be inherited. 

From childhood, during family trips, I was exposed to a wide range of textile arts: chador-shab weaving in the north, textile weaving in Yazd, qalamkar printing in Isfahan, and many other examples. At the time, all of these — even the heirlooms from previous generations — felt ordinary to me and held no special appeal. Later, however, they became part of my visual memory. The presence of a carpet loom and weaving tools at home (because of the classes my mother attended for a year) was also a constant part of my daily environment. 

What made these memories significant for my current work was the moment I realized I could draw on these lived experiences to express contemporary ideas. Today, this memory is no longer nostalgic but exists as an underlying layer in my choice of concept and form. I use traditional kilim weaving as a base and have expanded it in my own way to create freer and more personal textures. 

WAS THERE A PARTICULAR MOMENT WHEN YOU REALIZED WEAVING COULD BECOME MORE THAN A CRAFT—THAT IT COULD BE A WAY OF THINKING, REMEMBERING AND MAKING CONTEMPORARY ART?

That turning point came while my father was seriously ill. During those difficult months, witnessing his suffering affected me deeply. I felt an overwhelming need to express the experience without planning it in advance. 

My first significantly different work, Dialysis, emerged during that period, in 2013. I began weaving without a predetermined design. Black gradually became the dominant colour, and halfway through the process my father passed away. The work was completed at almost the same moment. Weaving became inseparable from remembering him. That experience showed me that tapestry could carry human vulnerability. It wasn’t simply a continuation of a traditional craft; it could become a language for grief, memory, and lived experience. 

Later, this understanding led me towards subjects such as migration, social anxiety, and collective memory. Tapestry has the ability to transform the intangible (loss, mourning, memory) into something physical through thread, woven gestures and colors.

ARCHITECTURE HAS BECOME CENTRAL TO YOUR PRACTICE. WHAT FIRST DREW YOU TO HISTORIC BUILDINGS, AND WHAT INTERESTS YOU ABOUT THEIR TRACES OF TIME?

What first captivated me was the structural logic that architecture shares with tapestry. Both are built gradually: one row by row with thread, the other brick by brick. That similarity in rhythm and accumulation made me want to reimagine architecture through weaving.

During travels through Iran’s historic cities, I became fascinated by the technical intelligence of these buildings, their use of local materials, and the way they respond to climate and human life. They stand in striking contrast to much contemporary architecture and prompted me to reflect on forms of beauty that are slowly disappearing.

Textiles have long symbolised home and protection in Iranian culture, and architecture evokes the same feeling for me. What interests me most is not simply visual beauty but the traces left by time and by the people who built and inhabited these places. A particularly important moment came when I visited the Khargerd School in Khorasan Razavi. I was captivated by its worn tiles and weathered stucco. Standing there, I wondered whether the students who once studied there noticed this beauty every day, or whether it had become invisible through familiarity. 

That question has stayed with me.

For me, deterioration is not simply a sign of decay: it is evidence of life. Every crack, every faded colour, every worn surface records generations of human experience. When I weave these buildings, I am not trying to reproduce them faithfully. I am trying to translate the lived experience they contain into another language.

YOUR ART TRANSFORMS ARCHITECTURE FROM SOMETHING MONUMENTAL INTO SOMETHING INTIMATE AND TACTILE. AT THE SAME TIME, WEAVING IS A SLOW PROCESS THAT MOVES BETWEEN CAREFUL PLANNING AND INTUITION. HOW DO THESE DIFFERENT ASPECTS COME TOGETHER IN YOUR PRACTICE?

Before beginning any project, I usually make a maquette. It helps me understand the dimensions, the installation, and the way the work will occupy space. Sometimes I spend weeks simply looking at it, imagining the colours, the scale, the connections between different parts, and even the moment when the work will finally be installed. But once the weaving begins, I enter a completely different stage.

The repetitive rhythm of weaving forces my mind to remain in the present moment. Sometimes that concentration becomes something close to meditation or conscious breathing. Unlike painting, which often allows quick, spontaneous movement, weaving requires long periods of physical stillness behind the loom. It creates a very different relationship with time. I move from the simplest elements, thread and warp, towards a unified whole. This is a form of contemplation about patience and gradual transformation. That concentration is never uninterrupted. It is constantly challenged by technical decisions, colour changes, and material choices. 

Recently, after spending an entire month weaving a piece, I believed it was ready to leave the studio. For me, planning and intuition are never separate stages. From the first maquette to the final installation, they remain in constant conversation.

IN RECENT YEARS YOUR WORK HAS INCREASINGLY REFLECTED ON DISAPPEARANCE AND FRAGILITY. HOW HAS THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR CHANGED THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT ARCHITECTURE, BOTH AS CULTURAL HERITAGE AND AS A PLACE OF BELONGING?

One day during the war, news spread that Golestan Palace had been damaged. Later that day, someone said to me, “People are being killed, and you’re worried about a historic palace?”. For me, those things have never been in opposition. Nothing can be compared to a human life. But historic buildings are not simply physical structures. They carry history, collective memory, and the experiences of countless generations. When they disappear, part of a culture’s story disappears with them.

The war fundamentally changed my understanding of architecture. Before, I was primarily interested in buildings themselves: their structure, their surfaces, and the slow traces of time. Today I think much more about the idea of home and the possibility of dwelling. When people lose their homes through war or forced migration, they lose far more than shelter. They lose memories, daily rituals, relationships, and part of their future. What affects me most is the thought that someone may no longer have a place to return to. Because of this, architecture has become less an object and more a setting for life. It holds identity, memory, and the relationship between people and the world around them.

Today my work revolves more than ever around ideas of home, fragility, attachment, absence, and the possibility of rebuilding. Protecting architecture is not only about preserving monuments. It is about preserving the possibility of belonging.

HOW HAS THE REALITY OF SUDDEN, DELIBERATE DESTRUCTION CHANGED YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO MAKING?

Before, I was mostly thinking about gradual erosion: a process where there was still hope for preservation and restoration. War introduced a different reality. Destruction can now be immediate, intentional, and irreversible. That has changed my sense of urgency completely.

During the attacks, I returned to the studio and continued working on a piece whose maquette I had made before the war. The original composition was built around bright reds, but as the bombing continued, darker and burnt colours entered the work almost unconsciously. It felt as though the piece itself was absorbing the grief and anxiety around me. When destruction becomes instantaneous, the fear is no longer simply that something will be forgotten. It is that it may disappear forever.

Weaving has become for me a quiet form of resistance; an attempt to preserve traces of life even while the world around me is being transformed. 

DO YOU THINK WEAVING HAS THE CAPACITY TO REPAIR, EVEN SYMBOLICALLY, WHAT HAS BEEN DESTROYED?

In contemporary art, repair rarely means returning something to its original state. More often, it is about finding a way to continue living with wounds, fractures, and absences. Weaving is not an act of reconstruction as much as a way of preserving memory. I find a profound expression of this idea in the work of Doris Salcedo, where repair becomes part of the narrative itself rather than an attempt to erase loss. I am also deeply inspired by the Japanese philosophy of Kintsugi—the belief that a break should not be hidden, but instead embraced as part of an object’s history and identity.

In my own work, particularly in my Tiles series, I have never sought to conceal absence. Instead, I try to make it visible, allowing it to become part of the work’s beauty, its meaning, and its story.

WHAT CONVERSATIONS DO YOU HOPE THESE WORKS OPEN FOR VIEWERS WHO MAY NOT KNOW THE HISTORY THEY REFERENCE?

I hope that even viewers who are unfamiliar with the history of Iranian architecture can still connect with the human experience at the heart of the work.

Today, more than anything, my country needs solidarity with its people. What matters most to me is that the work encourages viewers to ask themselves: Why are these acts of reconstruction necessary? Why is absence being made visible? I want to draw attention to that fragile moment: the moment when we suddenly recognize that something we always believed would endure may no longer exist.

AFTER EVERYTHING YOUR WORK HAS WITNESSED—FROM FADING MONUMENTS TO TODAY’S UNCERTAINTIES—WHAT CONTINUES TO GIVE YOU HOPE AS AN ARTIST?

Every morning, I greet the light and my hands.

Hope is not, for me, a sudden or overwhelming feeling. It takes shape quietly through the simple, daily act of making.

This morning, I woke up to the news that the war had begun again, and that southern Iran had come under attack. 

We fear that this time the consequences for ordinary people will be even heavier…