My family has been caretaker of a Shia shrine in Iran for generations. Our name, Motevalli, translates as "Keeper of the Shrine" and memories of childhood visits to the shrine permeate my work with an aesthetic and structural presence. My art aims to sustain the spirit and action of that shrine as a light for collective survival by merging the symbology of Islamic art and ritual with those of secular grassroots peoples’ movements for equality and justice worldwide.
Throughout my career as an artist and an educator in the Los Angeles area and internationally for the past 20 years, my work has consistently explored and upheld the cultural resistance and survival of people, particularly women or femme identified individuals, living in situations of poverty, conflict, and war. I am drawn to the aesthetics of Islamic Art as rooted in devotion and love through resistance, rebellion against unjust authoritarianism and personal sacrifice but also media and contemporary imagery which has derailed the international perception of these messages. Using varied media including installation, performance, sculpture, painting and drawing, printmaking, textiles and needlework, video, and collaborative public art, I juxtapose iconography and iconoclasm to secularize the ritual and aesthetic of Islam while retaining the mysticism of Sufi dervish tradition.
In the current political environment especially, secularizing symbology from Iranian and Islamic art is a transgressive act that I sometimes call “dervish hereticism”. Through performance, I use my body, history, and acquired knowledge to create dialogues that can impact perspectives and influence change. I employ all these strategies to help reflect alliances between grassroots people’s movements worldwide, expand thought within cultural communities, and engage beyond those communities for outsiders who might consider these groups as homogenous or monolithic.
My experience as a working-class transnational migrant is the foundation of my drive to create art that contests popular beliefs about immigrants and diaspora. The core of my practice continues to be in examining the creation of symbols or icons, what gives power to them, how this process is enacted on a human level, the means by which it can be utilized to shift power to create social awareness, and, ideally, bring agency back into the hands of individuals who have been subjugated by oppressive social processes. Symbols and signifiers exist in dialogue with one another based on collective understandings that might shift within local context or can be understood globally based on human experience. More than anything, I aim through my work to exploit these signifiers as relayed through these iconic symbols and how they are imbued with meaning, whether they are extracted from religion, mass media, or other forms which can be fetishized or detached from their original significance. These are manipulated, isolated, and contextually adjusted to address or change the surrounding historical circumstances. Through my art I push the boundaries of Islamic definition as well as external projections.