Statement on the Work:

Javid Mā: “Long live us”. I found the phrase on an online account that documents street graffiti from Tehran, written over the words "Javid Shah": long live the king. Someone had crossed out "Shah" and put "Mā" in its place. Us. By switching one word, the entire conversation has been centered on the people in this fight. 

Javid Shah is a phrase some people in the diaspora still hold onto. It carries the hope that if the current government falls, the monarchy comes back with it. I don't share that hope. I think we've already lived that chapter. But ultimately as somebody in the diaspora, I try to keep my own opinion quiet on this question. The perspective of the people living inside Iran carry much more weight in this conversation than mine does, and I follow their lead before my own instincts.

A second fight runs alongside this one, over which flag actually speaks for Iran, the current one or the old Lion and Sun. Iran carries more than 3,500 years of history, and dozens of flags have represented it across that span: lion and sun, tricolor, crest, script, and back again. Every color in this painting flew on one of them at some point.

I built the canvas the way you'd design a rug, a historical tool of story telling for the Iranian peoples. The size, the mirrored symmetry, the way the whole composition radiates out from a center point, all of it follows the logic of Persian rug-making. Symbols pulled from that same visual language run through the piece too. Missiles and nooses, as if the Iranian people have two options for how they can choose to perish, by the hands of an invading army raining rockets over their sky’s, or by the hands of their own government, going to any length to crush internal descent. And flowers such as narcissus, long believed to be a symbol of the resistance to adversity. And past those, a path to the unknown. A more hopeful future.   

I'm laying out a historical narrative while attempting to center the people. What comes next belongs to them.