My Mother Came in The Rain

My Mother Came in The Rain, 8m37s, 2023
Video Projection on textile collage screen with cardamom tea and Persian sweets

The patchworked tapestry tells a story of overlapping and entangled temporalities. The video projection mirrors the idea of telling a non-linear narrative, including time travel and trying to understand the past, and how I as the artist now see and interact with it. 

The video has interspliced imagery from the old iTunes visualizer from my childhood as a time travel portal, leading to film footage from the 1970’s when my mother and her family arrived in Germany dancing and embracing moments of familial joy. There are other clips of my mother looking at the camera with joy as a teenager. I had never seen images of my mother growing up and her demeanor before the Iranian revolution is so different than the way that I have known her throughout my life. 

My family's photo albums unexpectedly returned to us after 40 years of being lost. I engage with these photos by placing my body into the moment of going through this archive and analyzing them. Reflecting on a moment of loss and reappearance. I am trying to understand what traumas have occurred within my family history. For much of this gazing, I am lying down, resting, while looking.  Much of the information of this history is not apparent to me but there is a comfort in being surrounded by these objects. Throughout the video, buffering and loading signals appear representing gaps in this history.

This installation includes a table of sweets and cardamom tea, which mimics the gesture of serving tea and sweets when stories become too difficult to tell. Often times when I would press for further questions of a difficult story my family members would offer me tea and sweets as a way of avoiding talking about their past traumas more.