“Re-Counting is a portrait of a personal time, a layered archive of my experience of emigration. It is comprised of 14,934 sets of dates (every day of my life up to the date of completion of the work), in Persian or English, using the three different calendars with which I have measured my life. The red dots reflect significant personal or historical dates.

This one is specifically all the Persian years (when I lived in Iran before my exile), which works out to exactly before the Revolution. The round piece includes every day in a circular, seasonal calendar that is precisely measured and worked out in detail in an Illustrator programme before being applied to the circular panels.

The Heroes Martyrs Legends series began as a fascination with the need for heroes and the reverence for martyrs while looking at the crucial role they have played throughout history in a nation or civilisation’s culture. The headshots are of young student activists executed before and after the Revolution. They represent a generation dissolved in the zeitgeist of the romantic notion of a selfless revolutionary, which contributed to a major shift in the political direction of the country and the faith of the region. Reflecting the complexity of Iran’s recent history, these young students are honoured and respected by certain sections of society, raised to the status of martyr by some and labelled as traitors by others.

In the Commemoratives series of beaded images, I show events, rather than people, that are celebrated in government postal stamps.”