“I have always carried visions of Tehran’s mountains within me. My practice emerges from the emotional and cultural dissonance of relocation, translating feelings of displacement, memory, and shifting identity into a visual language. Through deconstruction, adaptation, and transformation, I rework everyday scenarios into metaphorical landscapes; spaces where meaning is unstable, fragmented, and constantly reforming. I often engage in absurd, ironic gestures such as the imagined act of moving mountains—to explore the impossibility of fully reconstructing what has been left behind. These gestures reflect the contradictions of living between places, of being simultaneously grounded and uprooted. Using humor as both a coping mechanism and a conceptual tool, I blur the line between absurdity and reality, crafting an ongoing dialogue with the places I inhabit and remember.

My work incorporates drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and installation to examine how cultural material shifts when relocated. It dwells in the tension between presence and absence, home and elsewhere. Ultimately, my practice is an attempt to carry fragments of place with me, while acknowledging that what is carried is always transforming—never whole, never fixed.”  (Elmira Yousefi)