Requiem
2016 - present | Found objects, copper sulfate crystals
Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN
Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, WI
Over a decade ago, I began collecting debris from various riots in Tehran. After each riot, the police would meticulously clean the streets, erasing any sign of human presence left behind in the aftermath. Several years later, these objects traveled with me to the United States, acting as relics—whose meaning is derived from the Latin feminine, “remaining,” based on linquere—“to leave.”
I began to experiment with acknowledging their relic status by coating these objects in copper sulfate—a chemical compound often used as an herbicide. Like the police presence in Iran, copper sulfate, deployed agriculturally, suppresses, symbolically weeding out dissidence. This experiment resulted in Requiem—a series of objects whose conflicted pasts are preserved in crystalline facades, holding tension between beauty and violence, remaining and leaving.
“Some of these materials have been gifted to me by refugees of war”
