Encoded Self

What is the story beneath the story?

• What remains when the archive fails to preserve a life?
  
  Three days after this wedding photograph was taken, the groom in it was dead, one of the 176 people killed when Flight PS752 was shot down by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards shortly after taking off from Tehran on 8 January 2020. Official narratives sought to close the story. The photograph, meanwhile, stayed quietly in a family album, carrying his future death within it. Without revealing anything, the image had already taken refuge in what would become its own coded history. For me, it became a medium for another kind of memory, one that resists denial, forgetting, and erasure.
  
  Encoded Self begins by rereading and reconstructing this single photograph. I divided the image into its individual elements, examined each one separately, and reassembled them across photography, weaving, text, and objects. Throughout, I intertwine mourning with resistance, linking them to distant memories and to my own lived experience.
  
  The project grows from a deeply personal event, but its scope reaches well beyond it. It draws on steganography, the practice of hiding messages within ordinary objects, to illuminate a bottom-up strategy of resistance long used by censored and marginalized communities, including women and queer communities, to protect themselves while passing on their memories. Hiding meaning in vernacular media offers protection while allowing memory to be encoded and safely passed to future generations.
  
  The series itself becomes a steganographic medium. Rather than presenting a collection of stories, it proposes a way of seeing and reading the world, and it asks viewers to take part in decoding. Meaning emerges through their movement between images, texts, and objects, and through repeated returns to earlier images. Each return to the same carrier gradually reveals the message hidden within it, while also evoking my own memories, which enter into continuous dialogue with the memory embedded in the object. The resulting narrative is intimate and expansive, direct and ambiguous, personal and self-reflexive. Layer upon layer, it reveals the complex, life-sustaining relationship between memory, resistance and survival.
  
  Join me in reimagining, re-reading your photographs, and tracing how our intimate experiences weave into larger patterns of history and power as we decode the secrets of this photograph. I craft layers of meaning, zooming in and out of photos, forever asking: What is the story beneath the story?