Noli Me Tangere

Artist’s Statement: My film raises questions about distance, visual and physical accessibility, and what these limitations and absences say about the subjection of bodies, history, and images. Through the vertical perspective of a downshooter camera, I choose a visual excavation to establish a correlation between personal history and the broader political history of Iran, my country of origin.

I currently live in the United States and cannot travel outside the country without losing the right to re-enter, due to travel restrictions linked to my nationality. Returning to Iran means losing the right to leave, which forces me into a state of involuntary immobility. I work with limited and indirect means of visual access, such as satellite imagery, Google Maps Street View, historical photographs gathered from the internet, and my own personal digital archive of family photographs. By printing them, these images become objects that are, to some extent, tangible: my only way to interact with places and people at a distance to create a moving image of a place I can no longer access with my own body or my camera.

This silent piece moves and excavates through a vertical perspective, as if it were an archaeological site, attempting to uncover or trace connections while examining how these images lead from one to another. This process of meaning-making relies on superimpositions, displacements/substitutions, and abrupt movements; a reflection on the glitches and inefficiencies of the digital images available to us, as well as on the political and psychological ramifications of existence in exile, distance, and living with ghosts.