Rainfall
Iran Photo 2019 at La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France, May 2019
Spartanburg Art Museum, Spartanburg, South Carolina, August 2019
Art Space Hamra, Beirut, Lebanon, June 2015
Rainfall examines contemporary issues surrounding the role of women in the Middle East. I tackle these political themes through a strategy of subtlety. This project captures both the rituals and the endless routine tasks that occur indoors amongst women engaged in their daily familial obligations.
Rainfall incorporates audio, photography and sculpture in an installation that reflects equally on laborious and poetic nature of Persian cuisine. Rice is used in many dishes in Asia and the Middle East and I consider cooking it as a creative act that has aspects of theatre. Imagine matriarchs of the khoone- trapped indoors and passing their days simmering stews and cooking aromatic rice. Rainfall explores the personal, and often untold, stories of women trapped in a dull existence.
In this work, I consider how the domestic lives of women act as another veil that hides them and their labor. In Rainfall,a woman is seen, through a window, as she cleans rice on a tray. Gradually she covers herself with rice until she disappears. These harmless household chores deaden the life of many uneducated and educated women in Iran.