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 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 and even contemporary mass-media 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.
My mediums and forms change, but the focus of my work stays in dialogue with signage and symbology from Iranian and Islamic art. They are significant in the construction of histories through documentation and archive. I explore methods which construct a collective perspective. This connective thread examines the creation of symbols or icons through persuasion or other means, and what gives power to images or language and how they enable philosophies or actions. My drive is to elucidate the power of the visual language of Islamic art, not its icons, iconoclasm and symbols directly. I am also influenced by symbology in American popular culture and movements, generated from within a people’s struggle for equality and justice, and how those symbols are also greedily bowdlerized in American media. My work then isolates and offers these symbols for discussion, exploiting the signifiers relayed through iconic symbols. It looks at how icons can be complemented through their various linguistic messages and how they can be manipulated to change historical circumstances.
My performances, installations, textile works and paintings and drawings are immediate and physical responses to media images, perception, events and phenomenon. I use my body, my history, my knowledge to create dialogues that can impact perspectives and influence change. In “Baba Karam Lessons”, inspired by Adrian Piper’s “Funk Lessons”, I taught an audience in California how to do a dance, mythologically from the south side of Tehran, considered the slum and the American audience learned a nuance of social class in Iran as they learned to dance like the jahels of south Tehran. The dance is a caricature of something danced by street tough men called “jahel”. The tradition of the dance has many complex layers that question, class, gender and sexuality.
In other performances, I have created characters to enhance and exaggerate aspects of my own personality in a blend with other people I have observed with a similar background to me. Two of these characters are the Sand Ninja and AK-AMI who for many years would overlap/oppose. They also allow their audience to define them to a certain extent through a projected understanding of how their “type” of character would be: The Sand Ninja as an over exaggerated orientalist fantasy or AK-AMI as a masked hijabi created from a perspective of guerrilla struggle of dominant power systems and a reaction by so many transnational Muslims post 9/11.
The Bikinis, the origin of my Stretch Manifesto series, as installation form of soft stretched fabric sculpture were slowly taking on the aesthetic principles of Islamic art with their shared triangular forms, a contrast to the view - even before 9/11 - of women from the Islamic world as desexualized and oppressed but here the agency of the femme body is at the forefront. I alter viewer engagement with this form through the installations I created with the architecture in the space mandating people bow their heads to walk underneath with the bikinis overhead, a traditional sign of reverence that unites all spiritualities, and this symmetry and geometry referenced sacred Islamic spaces, particularly ceilings of shrines. I am interested in how shrines are rooted in peaceful resistance, rebellion against unjust authoritarianism, and personal sacrifice for the greatest good, and as commemorative sites for the holding of memory.
In our current political environment especially, secularizing symbology from Iranian and Islamic art is a transgressive act that I sometimes call “dervish hereticism”.
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. I am interested in how shrines are rooted in peaceful resistance, rebellion against unjust authoritarianism, and personal sacrifice for the greatest good, and as commemorative sites for the holding of memory.
My current extended project series, Golestan Revisited, brings together many threads of my practice: it honors and documents individual women of all ages who have lost their lives to current wars of imperialism, researches the deep historical roots of colonization, and resurfaces their stories through the metaphor of the most feminine of love symbols across cultures, the rose, whose initial cultivars were found across Asia, both in China and through the SWANA (South and West Asia, North Africa) regions, but were uprooted and brought to the gardens of Western Europe during the Crusades.
My experience as a working-class transnational migrant is the foundation of my art.