My Two Bodies

My recent project, Two Bodies, explores the tension between my body and the surface of the image, gendered-invisibility, and censorship. I use different materials and processes in my image-making; printing on fabric, book-making, projection, and collage.

Two bodies dancing, one inverted like a shadow and the other fully illuminated, almost overexposed. They keep shifting from shadow to light until they slowly disappear.

Derived from the Latin word specere (to see, to look), “spectral” refers to the field of vision and the threshold of visibility. A spectral figure is always on the verge of appearing or disappearing but never fully does either—a phantom presence whose existence is bound to one’s vision.

In my work, the female character has a destabilized presence that is often contained by objects that can somehow materialize her—e.g., fabric, mirrors, or glasses are often the only traces of this female ghost, typically found in domestic spaces.

I use different materials and processes in my image-making. Inkjet printing on fabric, projection, shadows, and paper all engage in different dialogues with photographs, each pointing to different regimes of seeing. I am drawn to how my physical interactions can shape, distort, or skew the realities of these images as surfaces that deepen and expand within my vision.

Looking at the Victorian photographs of hidden mothers, I have always thought about the relationship between my mother and me, and the ways in which she chose to make herself invisible, holding us together as babies or even as adults. I made the “Two Mothers” fabric book with images of ghostly figures inverted and used the material of fabric as a tactile presence of a woman as the container of these images.

I made “A Mirror to My Home” as a TV reflecting the curtains covering my couch, referring to the idea of gendered invisibility in the context of Iran, which is apparent both in the media and in social settings. Women’s bodies, whose exposure is forbidden by law, are strictly censored on Iranian national TV. Objects used to cover their exposed skin are often elements from the domestic space, such as curtains or extensive usage of fabrics—curtains at times become the signs of a female presence in the house.

In contrast with the excessive visibility of men in the Iranian media, female spectrality in Iran has been institutionalized, applied with various methods from obscuring the body with domestic objects to blurring, and so on. This is the idea I refer to in my “I Wrestle with Paper” collage piece, making the masculine body tucked in the folds of paper. While these observations critique certain practices, they are not intended to generalize or comment on the broader cultural or religious values that inform these representations.

References:
- Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik, eds. Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh University Press, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1bgzdfx.