Presence of an Absence
2019-2021
The idea for this series emerged during the artist’s residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Nine thousand used gloves belonging to Iranian oil workers were collected over two years. They were then assembled into giant netlike structures and installed on buildings that were historically related to the oil industry. Oil has been the main source of income for Iran and other Middle Eastern countries since it was discovered and first extracted by the British colonial power in the early twentieth century. But it has also been linked to a general decline of local economies and societies. In Iran, the 1953 coup d’état (aided by the United Kingdom and the United States), the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and the war with Iraq (1980–88) were all directly related to oil, bearing witness to its strategic significance in the global economy. After the controversial reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, although oil income was at an all-time high, the country was hit by record inflation and widespread corruption, the consequences of which can be felt to this day. In much the same way as empty tables and empty hands signify poverty, the worn-out, oil-soaked gloves referred to the dire situation of Iran’s industrial workers. They had been woven together into a textured web that ‘covered’ the buildings and their fraught history, while symbolically forming a collective hand raised in a gesture of defiance. It is particularly telling that the workers of the governmentowned National Iranian Oil Company helped the artist collect and assemble the gloves. The installation has been exhibited in, and adapted to, various contexts:
Vahdat Hall Tehran, Iran 2021 Formerly known as Roudaki Hall, Vahdat Hall is one the largest venues for live art in Iran. It was inaugurated in 1967, towards the end of the Third Development Plan, which coincided with an unprecedented influx of oil money.Presence of an Absence was exhibited there as part of the 8th Tehran National Sculpture Biennial. It was the first time that it was staged in an indoor setting. Despite numerous difficulties, it eventually launched but was shut down soon afterwards following an emergency visit by the speaker of the Islamic Consultative Assembly.
Philosophy of the Bedroom
2015-2016
This series is one of the artist’s most personal bodies of work. The bedroom becomes a space of solitude, where the individual is compelled to confront the self. The self remains suspended between contrasting emotions and states.
Cinema Europe
2018
Cinema Europe takes its name from one of Tehran’s old cinemas. The installation reconstructs the setting of a cinema using worn cinema seats, a large curtain made from used black chadors, and a series of paintings. Instead of projecting an image onto the curtain, the curtain itself becomes the subject on display, illuminated by a spotlight.
The chadors used to make the curtain were collected from women, who were given a new chador in exchange for each used one. Many agreed to the exchange only after being assured that their old chadors would be used for a religious purpose. Once collected, the chadors were sewn together to form the large cinema curtain.
Alongside this space is a series of painted portraits of women that draw on the visual structure of official images of martyrs from the Iranian Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War—images that traditionally depict men. In these paintings, women replace these male figures.
Connections
2017-2025
The Connections series developed from a website called peyvandha.ir, launched in 2009 amid the expansion of internet filtering in Iran. The website displayed images of flowers which, in contrast to the name “Connections,” created no actual connection and led nowhere.The flower and nature images from the website become a recurring visual element in this series. An image associated with restricted access and disconnection in the online space is removed from that context and repeatedly reconstructed through painting.
This reconstruction takes place through a slow, repetitive, and time-consuming process. The image gradually moves away from its initial clarity, shifting between layers of colour, light and shadow, visibility and disappearance. Repeating a digital image through the material process of painting creates the possibility of pausing and looking at it again.
An Empty Sofreh
2020-2021
An Empty Sofreh developed from the relationship between oil as one of Iran’s primary sources of wealth and the Sofreh as part of everyday life. This relationship has also repeatedly entered Iranian political discourse through the promise of “bringing oil money to people’s Sofreh.”
In this project, empty rice sacks were collected with the collaboration of a group of women and sewn together to form large-scale Sofrehs. The surfaces of these assembled Sofrehs were covered with tar, a material derived from oil.
The juxtaposition of empty rice sacks and tar holds within the work the distance between oil as national wealth and the sofreh as a space associated with everyday needs.
Sofreh-Kalamkari
2020-2023
The Sofreh – Kalamkari series is made using cotton fabrics from traditional Kalamkari workshops. In traditional Kalamkari, patterns are printed onto fabric using wooden blocks and natural dyes, ranging from floral and arabesque motifs to scenes drawn from Iranian narratives and literature.
The fabrics collected and used in this series were often used in Kalamkari workshops to test blocks and colours during the working process. As a result, traces of different blocks remain on their surfaces in irregular, scattered, and sometimes unfinished arrangements. Rather than being finished Kalamkari pieces, these fabrics retain traces of the process of making.
In this series, these experimental and asymmetrical pieces become the ground for the paintings. Some are covered with tar, while others are painted through a repetitive and time-consuming process of dotting.
A Fire Appeared, A Fire Spread
2023-2024
Synchronised Double Projection, Black and White, Sound 07 min 07 sec (loop) -Ed.3- Steel, tar, plaster, and glass paint (container). Produced with the support of the Konschthal Esch. In collaboration with the Centre national de l’audiovisuel, Samsa Film, The Iranian National Cinematheque and Ferroforum.
A Fire Appeared, A Fire Spread brings together archival footage, video, sound, and metal engraving to explore the histories of the national oil industry in Khuzestan, Iran, and the national steel industry in the Minett region of Luxembourg. Throughout the early 20th century, both industries transformed the landscapes, economies, labour relations, and everyday life of these regions, and traces of these transformations remain present today.
The double projection features archival footage from these two industrial regions alongside one another. This juxtaposition allows connections between natural resources, industry, labour, and economic and political structures to emerge across two different geographies. Sound also forms part of this connection: the soundscape features a Tombak performance by Hossein Tehrani (1912–1974), in which the rhythm and sound of a train enter the language of the instrument.
Another part of the installation consists of steel vessels engraved with landscapes drawn from the oil and steel industries. In these works, the traditional technique of Qalamzani is combined with Hodaei’s dot-based painting method. Beneath the vessels, following the traditional process of Qalamzani, a layer of tar is applied—a material that is both part of the making process and reconnects the work to the history of oil and industry.
In this project, archive and material come together as carriers of history. Oil, steel, tar, the sound of the train, and archival images each retain traces of processes that extend beyond industrial history, connecting to labour, natural resources, economies, and human lives.
The Headless Palms of Arvand Kenar
2024-2025
This series developed from the landscape of southern Iran, where the date palm is deeply intertwined with everyday life, the economy, and cultural memory. In Arvand Kenar, near Abadan and the Iraqi border, the palm groves were profoundly altered during the Iran–Iraq War and, in the decades that followed, continued to be affected by drought, pollution, and increasing soil and water salinity. A date palm cannot survive once its crown has been severed. The headless trunks that remain in this landscape therefore have a distinct physical presence.
The paintings in this series are built slowly through thousands of individual dots of glass paint. From a distance, the landscape remains recognizable; up close, the image dissolves into dots, surfaces, and accumulated marks. This repetitive and time-consuming process introduces a different temporality into the image, slowing both its making and the act of looking. At a time when images and events circulate at an overwhelming speed, it becomes increasingly difficult for an image to resist immediate consumption.
Rather than reconstructing the past as a fixed narrative, these works remain with its material traces: damaged landscapes and altered forms that continue to carry what has happened to them.
Seven Coral Domes
2025
Seven Coral Domes is a painting series shaped by the connection between nature and poetry, and centred around the meaning of a word: dome—an architectural structure resembling a hollow hemisphere that, in Iranian culture and literature, also serves as a metaphor for the sky and the cosmos.
During research on oil pollution on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf, one of the region’s most valuable marine ecosystems, the artist encountered a species of dome-shaped coral. These corals play a vital role in sustaining the marine ecosystem, while pollution caused by oil transportation, along with industrial fishing, threatens their survival and the chain of life that depends on them.
At the same time, a rereading of The Seven Domes (Haft Gonbad) by Nezami Ganjavi (1141–1209 CE) created another connection to this form. In this epic-lyrical tale, a king spends the seven days of the week beneath seven domes, each associated with one of the seven planets, seven colours, and seven princesses from seven realms. Each princess tells an allegorical story, and together these narratives form an inner journey for the king.
The series consists of seven paintings, each shaped by a coral dome and a colour, with each colour carrying its own narrative. The title of each work distils a fragment of that narrative: Black Coral Dome: Separation, Yellow Coral Dome: Truthfulness, Green Coral Dome: Pure Nature, Red Coral Dome: Love, Blue Coral Dome: Mirror, Sandalwood Coral Dome: Good and Evil, and White Coral Dome: Fulfilment.
Each painting depicts a coral dome—a solitary narrator and a remnant of an Eden-like garden in the depths of the sea, now transformed into a desert. Like the princesses in Nezami’s tale, each coral dome tells its own story and invites the viewer, like the king, to listen.
The paintings are made with glass paints, whose transparency intensifies the presence and reflection of light across the surface. Layers of tar, one of the derivatives of oil, are also incorporated into the paintings, connecting the research into oil and pollution directly to the material of the work. And just as Persian script is read from right to left, the narrative order and spatial arrangement of the seven paintings follow the same direction.
Hormuz After the Rain
2025-2026
This series is based on images taken around Hormuz Island, off the southern coast of Iran and near the Strait of Hormuz, after the flood of December 2025. Following heavy rainfall, the island’s red mineral soil flowed into the waters of the Persian Gulf, altering the color of the sea.The images return to an event that, through its repeated return to a condition, loses its clear beginning and end and enters a continuous cycle of repetition.
The landscapes in this series are built gradually through thousands of colored dots. From a distance, the image approaches a legible landscape; up close, it turns into a surface of dots, stains, and colored sediments. The accumulation of dots slows the gaze and disrupts the rapid consumption of the image.
Alongside the paintings are drawings made with a red pen on small sheets of paper, produced between late February and March 2026, during a period of instability and displacement caused by war. These drawings are daily and repetitive records of the red waters of Hormuz Island. They are not preparatory sketches for the paintings, but both a record and a return to a skin-like remnant of that period; something between landscape, document, and residue.
