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 — colour, texture, and gesture layered until a surface holds several moments at once.

The self-portraits treat the face as contested ground. Often obscured, fragmented, or withheld, they come out of living among documents, databases, and biometric images — systems that promise to capture a person completely. The paintings ask what escapes that capture.

The figure paintings place faceless, standing bodies on inherited painted grounds. Their stillness holds a quiet agency: the capacity to remain present within conditions one did not choose. Endurance not as heroism, but as the keeping-open of possibility.

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.