My work transforms personal experiences of grief and displacement into communal acts of reflection and healing. As an Iranian-American artist, I use everyday objects to explore themes of memory, loss, and resilience. In my installations, Healing with a Cup of Tea and Lives Lost & Threads of Time, I incorporate teabags and deconstructed shirts—materials embedded with personal and collective histories.
Drinking tea is a ritual deeply rooted in my upbringing in Iran, symbolizing hospitality, connection, and endurance. I invite participants to contribute their used teabags to the installation, transforming an intimate daily act into a shared gesture of remembrance and community.
The suspended shirts, stitched back together with red thread, reference the Jewish mourning practice of kriah, in which a rabbi tears the collar of a mourner’s garment to mark a loss. The cascading red threads spill onto the floor, evoking both severance and repair, mourning and renewal. Beneath them, a Persian rug serves as a grounding presence—a reminder that home and belonging are not fixed but ever shifting, carried with us.
