Solo Photography Exhibition
Iranian Artists Forum, Tehran
July 2013
Written Lines did not begin with a clear decision. In the early years of my photographic practice, without knowing that I was making a series, I kept pausing before lines, traces, surfaces, fractures, shadows, and quiet structures appearing in nature, architecture, and everyday spaces. The photographs were taken across different regions of Iran; some are in color, others in black and white. Yet for me, the exact location was never the center of the work. What connects these images is a shared quality of attention: attention to things that are always before the eye, but easily disappear within the ordinary flow of looking. In this series, the line is not simply form. It may be the trace of movement, the border between two surfaces, a fracture of light, the shadow of branches, the path of water, or the erosion of soil. These lines resemble writing, but they do not become language. They can be read, but not reduced to a fixed meaning. Human presence is sparse in most of the photographs, but it is not absent. It remains in the act of seeing itself in the distance, the frame, the pause, the choice, and the attention given to the world. For me, Written Lines was one of the first places where I understood that an image can move beyond subject matter and become a relation between gaze, surface, place, time, and memory. In this project, abstraction is not a departure from the world; it is a way of coming closer to it. Written Lines is an attempt to read what has not been written, yet is present to see the traces the world silently holds on its surface.