Timeless portal (2022). Silent projection onto handmade screen: watercolor on vellum paper covered in transparent fabric. In this video, taken in Tehran, Iran during my first visit to the country in 17 years, my aunt and I hang laundry to dry on the balcony. There is a timelessness in the routine being displayed in the video, rooted in nostalgia, generationality, and ancestry. I feel simultaneous closeness and disconnect from Iran due to my family’s self-exile from our homeland. This hanging piece of laundry acts as a portal across borders, a window into an intimate, mundane moment of domestic life in Iran.

The watercolor drawings of flowers mimic the patterns on the bedsheets that were laid out for my mother and I during our visit and the twelve sections are assembled like window panes. When hung, the piece resembles a bedsheet hung to dry and moves in the breeze. However, the portal can be easily folded, transported to a new location to act as a vessel for imagination.