Art & Architecture

Monument to the Children of the Middle East  Murdered in my Name (2025)

This performance art / replicable + scalable ritual piece came out of a combination of a childhood spent in the shadow of 9/11 and decades of unnecessary American intervention in the "Middle East" / Western Asia.

As a girl growing up in the Texas countryside and public school system, I remember vividly creating flower potions and eating "Freedom Fries" -- this piece speaks to an evolved manifestation of those experiences that results in a healing modality: I  incorporate concepts like ritual, religious practice, whimsy, bodily partitioning, hopefulness, propaganda, the war machine, and localization.

Monument Video 1 - Intro
Monument Video 2 - Initial Run Thru
Monument Video 3 - FULL RITUAL + REFLECTION

"At the Feet of the Mother:"
Iran Feminism Flag (2023-2026)

As an Iranian-American woman, oftentimes I feel trapped between the Islamic Republic, Iranian expat community propaganda (increasingly driven by algorithms and outside actors), Christian nationalism, and neo-Americanisms.

This piece is a provocation that everyone would rather I keep silent, it would earn me ire from conservative and even moderate communities -- both Iranian and American.

In it, I replace "God is Great" with "At the Feet of the Mother" in "activated" religious calligraphy (important in Islamic Arts traditions). I replace the internal symbol of the Islamic Republic's flag with a minimalist-abstracted vagina.

While I think it is very funny and has the potential to reframe our violent nationalist societies through the lens of womanhood, it would probably get me thrown in jail in Iran. For now, in the United States of America, I can still make this piece.

"Honest to God" (2026) takes an image of an explosion on an oil field in the early 1900s from historical archives in Beaumont, TX, and adds a "feminine," pink / violet hue as well as a contemporary lament in a cursive script that is no longer being taught in Texas public schools -- but which defined most correspondence prior to the 21st century. It utilizes themes of industrialization, internalized and overt misogyny, memory-destructive capitalism, and childhood mythologies.

The writing reads:

"honest to God they’ve got us drinking oil now until it runs out of our eyes and nose and mouth and I’m choking, I’m choking, and they’ve got Cici’s pizza in the mall where the parking lot is for the new lng plants or the new plastics plants or the new energy plants. you can’t go anywhere and there aren’t even big old oak trees or pine trees by the schools anymore where you can fall and scrape your knee waiting for your mom to pick you up when she never even wanted to anyway, she just wanted to leave you and your dad and your sister and be a gogo dancer just like your dad always said. women are like that – unreliable."