How did Self Portrait and Other Ruins come about? Self Portrait and Other Ruins?
Honestly, it wasn’t planned at all. It started from a very personal place - a need to process grief. In 2021, I had just begun an MFA in Contemporary Performative Arts at the University of Gothenburg, but because of the pandemic, everything was online. Since my project was connected to Iran, I decided to travel there. While I was in Tehran, my grandmother suddenly passed away from Covid. It was a shock - the doctors thought she would recover.
Going back to her home, where I grew up, and finding it empty... that was incredibly difficult. That house wasn’t just a house; it was like my homeland. She was the root I came from. Being there, memories came flooding in - I could feel my whole childhood around me. I started dancing, almost instinctively, with those memories, with those ghosts.
So the film emerged from that process?
Exactly. I didn’t set out to make a film. I was just moving through grief, trying to make sense of things. I filmed some of it with a laptop camera - very raw, very DIY. Later, during editing, it started to take shape. I sent the footage to my friend Ella Bergström, a composer I hadn’t even met in person at the time. She improvised music while watching the film. It became a kind of long-distance duet - me dancing in my grandmother’s home, her composing in her studio.
What did the process reveal for you?
When I danced, the boundaries between time, life, and death seemed to collapse. I felt deeply connected to the women who came before me. Death didn’t feel particularly scary or sad anymore, it was another layer of life - they both felt like part of the same ongoing dance. Maybe that’s why the film feels alive, even in its imperfections.
Your work avoids representing suffering as spectacle - how did you develop this approach?
I never set out to show suffering - I dance to understand it. That’s how my dance journey began. I found a way to process rage and pain through movement. Dancing lets me fully feel what’s happening in my body and around me, embody it, and slowly transform it.
In this work too, I moved through a wide range of emotions -pain, anger, love, gratitude. As I danced, those feelings began to shift and change color.
This year, when we turned the film into an installation at Vagon gallery, it opened a new layer. Showing it in an exhibition space felt like stepping back into that house, that emotional world. It allowed both me and the audience to move through those memories in a more immersive, embodied way.
What are you currently working on, and what are your plans going forward?
Over the past two and a half years, as genocides have unfolded in Gaza, Sudan, and Congo - and as we witness the ongoing destruction of human lives and ecosystems globally - I’ve found myself existentially questioning my role as an artist. My understanding of what it means to make art in this moment is shifting drastically. I dont have a language that can adequately capture the scale of devastation we’re living through. Right now, I’m searching - for a language, a space, a way to comprehend and respond to the situation we’re in.
At the same time, I’ve been deeply affected by the intense censorship faced by pro-Palestinian voices in Germany. Exhibitions and performances have been cancelled, prizes withdrawn, funding cut, and artists criminalised simply for criticising the Israeli government’s ongoing crimes and genocide in Gaza. The Archive of Silence platform offers a powerful and comprehensive overview of this silencing. It’s something I’ve felt personally and collectively, and it’s shaping how I think about artistic responsibility.
In February 2025, I began initial research for a new video installation during the IEA Artist-in-Residence program at Alfred University in New York. The work engages directly with the experience of artistic expression under conditions of war, genocide, censorship, and repression. It explores how the body, sound, and fragmented memory can hold and transmit truths that are otherwise silenced or erased from dominant discourse.
In parallel, I’m working on an artistic research project focused on a forgotten feminist lineage within Kathak, the traditional South Asian dance form I was trained in and now teach in Berlin. This aspect of Kathak - where women used dance as a space for resistance, expression, and sensuality - was systematically erased through colonial, patriarchal, and religious interventions. Reclaiming this lost history, and reawakening it through politicisation and radicalisation, feels both urgent and necessary.
What connects these projects is a shared impulse: to trace what has been silenced or erased - whether in the present or in the past - and to find ways of speaking to it, with it, and through it. I don’t pretend to have answers, but I’m committed to asking questions honestly, and to using dance and film as tools for remembering, resisting, and bearing witness.
