Utopia

Utopia—the imagined ideal place, or perhaps a non-place—has appeared in different forms across cultures and societies, reflecting a persistent human desire for a better world. Yet the pursuit of Utopia is inseparable from the possibility of its opposite: Dystopia. In our everyday lives, the movement toward one can also become a step toward the other. New technologies may come at the expense of natural resources; well-intentioned actions can carry unforeseen consequences; devotion to one ideal can lead to the rejection of another; heroes can metamorphose into villains.

As an artist, this contradiction—the dialectic between Utopia and Dystopia, and the potential transformation of good into evil—has long occupied my thoughts. Having immigrated to the United States from Iran in 2016, I have experienced this tension in increasingly personal ways. Migration has made the distance between utopian longing and lived reality more tangible to me. Leaving behind personal and artistic roots, while confronting the uncertainties and possibilities of life as an immigrant artist, has heightened my awareness of how utopian and dystopian elements can coexist within the same place and experience.

In these works, I explore this unstable relationship through architecture, ornament, figures, and imaginary beings. In approaching Utopia, I draw upon the architectural idea of a harmonious place, incorporating decorative patterns and forms inspired by traditional Persian architecture. These structures suggest order, continuity, and the possibility of communal life, while remaining imagined and ultimately unattainable spaces.

In the Dystopian works, Deevs play a central role. Rooted in ancient Persian and Zoroastrian traditions, Deevs are associated with deception, disorder, and destructive forces. My visual interpretation of these creatures draws particularly from the work of Mohammad Siah Qalam, whose unsettling figures and hybrid beings inhabit a space between observation, satire, and the imaginary. His departure from the conventions of Persian miniature painting and his attention to the social realities of his time continue to resonate with my own interest in the relationship between the real and the imagined.

Metamorphosis becomes a way of examining the unstable boundary between these opposing worlds: how the desire for an ideal world can contain the possibility of its opposite, how good can transform into evil, and how Utopia and Dystopia may coexist within the same place, image, and experience.