Residency project:
2025 - Showing those we cannot see

Context: The project is based on photographic research begun in 2002 in remote and even dangerous areas of Iran. At that time, very little information was available about the people living in these remote areas (the Alborz mountains, the province of Sistan Baluchistan, the desert of the province of Fars, etc.), and I wanted to go and meet them. These immersive journeys, which lasted more than ten years, resulted in more than a thousand photographs documenting the lives of these people struggling with particularly harsh daily conditions and environments. In 2013, all of this artistic work was brutally seized by the Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guards. I was arrested, tortured and sentenced to six years in Evin Prison in Tehran for continuing illegal artistic activities, propaganda against the regime and insults to religion. These photographs were never returned to me.  Fortunately, however, a small number of these images managed to escape the Pasdaran's clutches. It was when I arrived in France, where I had sought political asylum, that I decided to revisit the fate of all these photos, both those I had managed to save and those that had been taken from me. I realised that the common thread running through this whole ‘experience’ is the constant tension between what we see and what we don't see: the people I had lived alongside did not see each other, did not meet in the cities because they lived in very remote areas. Furthermore, they did not appear in the news because they faced issues (extreme poverty, inadequate medical, educational and road infrastructure, exposure to drug and oil trafficking, armed conflict) that the regime preferred to hide. The censorship of my photos was proof that these remote communities represented an uncomfortable reality. Showing this reality exposed me to the risk of disappearing from public life while serving my sentence in a Tehran prison.  

Project: Based on this observation, I decided to continue working on this tension between what we see and what we don't see by:
- providing a space for visibility for the photos I was able to save from capture by the Revolutionary Guards. I plan to exhibit the photos I was able to save.
 
- recreating the ‘lost’ photos, which can no longer be seen because they were confiscated. To do this, I plan to record as much information as possible about several of the photos that were taken from me. These textual descriptions, captions for photos that have now disappeared but survive in my mind's eye, will be used to feed into visual reconstruction devices.