Memorial began during my MA in Photography at UAL, and it has kept unfolding ever since, through my repeated return to the family archive I carried with me from Iran.

I don’t think of family photographs as evidence. They promise the past, but what they actually hold is more uncertain: gaps, distortions, things quietly rewritten by memory and time. A shadow across a wall, the crease in a print, a gesture half caught. These can matter as much as the people in the frame.

I work with albums, film stills, collage, fabric, and installation, treating the archive as something alive rather than fixed. Images get removed, layered, folded, enlarged, torn apart and put back together, not to restore them, but to let memory show itself as partial and physical, the way it actually feels.

Memorial sits between the private and the collective. It’s about my own family, but also about home, survival, migration, and what gets carried, or lost, across borders and generations. I’m not trying to recover the past as it was. I’m returning to it, unsettling it, and building something new from what remains.