I am a refugee of the Iran Iraq War, and lived in the United States for 40 years before relocating to France this year. I make work concerned with my identity and it is often autobiographical. My approach to art-making has a strong base in improvisation. By engaging in video art and film I hope to partake in the tradition of the “camera-pen”, and use the camera as a personal brush and tool for mark making , the script as ground for dramatic structure and play. My interest is in visual poetry, texture, and light, the associations of imagery, and the juxtaposition of visual signs as means to access the subconscious.

I started out as a painter studying in the underground in Iran during the 1979 Revolution, and later getting a MFA from Portland State University as a refugee. As an abstract paintier I was not able to directly communicate a narrative through my medium. So I studied film, video art, and performance in NYC to explore elements of time, movement, sound, and sequencing to create a vision. I am fascinated by cinema as a discussion of form and story through the language of film , a discourse in which self-expression, communication, and understanding have the power to provoke and disturb. In the words of Jacques Derrida, “Cinema is an art form where we can believe without believing.”

The work pictured below is made with green screen, performance, and archival footage from the internet. I performed with Aaron Zinder, and am responsible for the performance, art direction, props, editing, and costume. I was the directing while I performed, and I worked with a group of students in my class with Scott Kiernan of ESPTV at Hunter College’s IMAMFA program, and they shot the piece. The title of the work is: War for Oil.