from series Nameh  نامه
looped single-channel videos (2020)

Once I bleached the pages in a book about Persian miniature paintings to scrub it clean of people. I was in the single digits, and my religious uncle told me art was idolatry. But with the epic paintings blotted clear of faces, the tableaux seemed all the more alive for a boy like me, who’d rather envision the lovers of old as two men, or Seyavash as a beefcake. Alas, with turn-of-the-millennium gifs (the hieroglyphs of my youth) perhaps one can unlook.