My migration from Iran to Australia has allowed me to live in relative peace, yet the physical distance has never spared me from the emotional and psychological impact of ongoing traumatic news from my homeland. These experiences seep into my psyche, layering over time and obscuring the fragments of memory that remain of my loved ones and the places I left behind.

As a child during the Iran - Iraq war of the 1980s, I remember counting the taped windows of houses whenever I went out with my family. I did not understand why people taped them, but the crossed and diamond shapes appeared at once decorative, unusual, and frightening. I don’t recall ever asking my parents the reason, yet during the recent twelve-day war between Iran and Israel, this memory resurfaced vividly. Not being with my loved ones, I kept imagining whether their windows would shatter, and those diamond, and cross shapes of my childhood returned to me as stark symbols of fragility, fear, and survival.

Windows of War, it’s a series of abstract oil paintings that represents the psychological ruptures caused by repression, war, and loss, and the way these forces have shaped ongoing waves of migration across the Middle East for decades. Through abstract paintings, I translate these layered experiences of memory, trauma, and displacement. Drawing inspiration from the cultural and geopolitical realities of Iran and the wider Middle East, I aim to create a sense of diversity, repetition, and the presence of people by colour mixture, to convey these lived layered experiences of memory and trauma, I reframe the geometric structures of taped windows as grids of duality, dissonance, and displacement and by centralising thick, penetrating movements of black paint across the grid, to induce the ongoing emotional dissonances within diaspora.

top to the bottom (left to right) : Image: Sediment of Ashes Medium: Oil on Linen Size: 61 cmx 61 cm + 1.5 cm, Year: 2025

Image: detail of Sediment of Ashes Medium: Oil on Linen Year: 2025

Images: Untitled,  Medium: Oil on Linen Size: 121cmx 100cm + 1.5 cm, Year: 2025

Image: detail of Untitled,  Medium: Oil on Linen Year: 2025