You Can’t Just Leave a Mountain Behind

I have always carried visions of Tehran’s mountains within me. In, You Can’t Just Leave a Mountain Behind, I deconstruct the cultural material of my homeland, dragging it from one geographical context to another. Through this process, I engage in the absurd and ironic act of moving mountains, a metaphor for my shifting location and identity. My work translates feelings of displacement and uncertainty into a visual language, using deconstruction, adaptation, and transformation drawn from scenarios from my everyday life. This process is often contradictory, requiring me to get lost in multiple places simultaneously and to squeeze through any emerging gaps where meaning shifts and reforms. My journey is both playful and unsettling, as I reflect on the impossibility of fully reconstructing what has been left behind. Using humor, I sustain an imaginary relationship with the mountain, blurring the line between absurdity and reality. By shifting fragments into new contexts, I explore how meaning is reshaped through relocation. My work revels in both the possibility of carrying a place with me and the impossibility of ever fully reconstructing what has been left behind.