About

I was born in Tehran and came to painting by a long route, training first in medicine before studying art at City Lit and the Slade. Both facts sit inside the work. Displacement gave me my questions — memory, belonging, what it means to be seen — and medicine gave me the habit of slow, close attention. I now live and work in East London, where my studio has become part of the subject itself.

At the centre of my practice is an act of return. I rework canvases over months, sometimes years: painting over them, partially erasing them, building on what survives. Earlier gestures stay visible beneath later ones, so the surfaces carry the physical evidence of time. Nothing is simply finished and left behind. An abstract painting becomes the ground for a figure; a self-portrait is repainted over a former version of itself; the residue of all this making reappears later in photographs. Meaning develops between the works as much as within them.

The abstract paintings grow by accumulation, compressing many moments of making into one surface — a kind of inverted history painting, concerned with history as structure rather than story. They are deliberately small, refusing the heroic scale of gestural abstraction and asking to be approached closely, where the surface rewards slow looking and the eye begins to excavate. Their titles, drawn from ordinary speech (there is always tomorrow, never mind), open a tone rather than fix a meaning.

The self-portraits treat the face as contested ground. Displacement means being re-described — held in paperwork, accent, and category — and these paintings, made from memory rather than the mirror, test the conditions under which a person becomes visible at all. Obscured, fragmented, or withheld, the face claims a right to remain partially opaque, without forgetting that being unseen can be imposed as well as chosen.

The figure paintings turn from the face to the body: faceless figures that simply stand, set late onto earlier paintings whose marks and failures remain visible around them. What happens at that meeting is not decided in advance, and it echoes a broader condition: we all arrive into circumstances we did not make. Kept to the scale of a hallway rather than a monument, the figures refuse to become emblems of endurance; they claim only that someone is here, and that the rest is still open.

Photography attends to what painting leaves behind. The Shed Project and The Cloth Project record dust, stains, hardened rags, and pigment marks: the studio as an archive of gesture and accumulated time.

There is beauty in the work, but I don't allow it to settle into reassurance. The paintings are gritty, awkward in places, unresolved; they push against the expectation that a canvas should become a pleasing object on a wall.

Everything I make works against the speed and disposability of contemporary image culture. Painting slows the image down. Photography stays with what remains after it.