I am a musician, photographer, and poet, originally from Iran but now based in Berlin. Working across different media, I think of art as a form or documentation and interpretation. I have entered music as a viola player, but later turned mainly to experimental music and composition. I compose to study music as a living phenomenon looking at history, anthropology, and materiality, to document and interpret what I find. The music that inspires and interests me most is that played by musicians in quotidian social settings, especially folkloric microtonal music. I explore the architecture of instruments, including the materials of which they are made and their design, by remodelling old instruments and building my own experimental instruments. I enjoy playing in different physical environments, natural and built, observing how music enters into dialogue with and reflects the world around it. I am also deeply interested in history of early music in the Near East, its interrelationship with languages and literatures, its transmission between different regions, the evolution of tuning systems and the modern history of attempts to reconstruct and interpret early music. At the same time, I practice electronic music produced in analog way (analog synthesiser and analog recordings), creating my own structure and patches. Collaboration is central to my practice. I do improvisation and am very interested in collaborations with filmmakers, visual artists, and choreographers to bring my music in conversation with other forms of art.
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In my work as a photographer, I also follow my interest in structural consistency between different art forms, exploring the links between photography and literature, language and light, words and images. I do analogue photography experimenting with chemicals and printing techniques, exploring many layers of documenting and memorializing that each image carries in itself. I am fascinated by “marginalized memorials” – private family photo archives discarded to trash and flea markets – in which I find the finest form of documentary photography. I collect them and include them in my artistic work, exploring meanings of history, memory, poetry, and storytelling.
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Poetry has been a part of my life from my childhood spent in a village in eastern Iran. I first experienced poetry as a living tradition of communal recitals, passed down through generations, in the circles of Sufis to which my father belonged. Old manuscripts with poems written in beautiful hand by my grandfather and his forefathers were kept and treasured in my family. Poetry has become the richest source of my artistic inspiration and a solace in turbulent times. I write poetry and short stories in Persian, and I have led the Persian poetry reading circle at Mejlis Institute (in Armenia and online) for several years.
I am mainly self-taught and have no formal academic background, however, throughout my life I have benefited from mentorship and guidance of many teachers and peers, in academic and non-academic settings alike. I am deeply grateful for what I have learned and continue to learn from them.