Study of an anatomy in the absence of the body: Pieta

The painting is from the Zahak-nameh series, an ongoing series of narrative paintings initiated in Iran in 2012. After a prolonged pause, I returned to the series in 2024, amid the unrelenting wars and systemic violence sweeping across the Middle East—conflicts sustained, in part, by the strategic complicity of Western powers, including Canada. The early works in Zahak-nameh draw from Persian mythology and epic literature, fusing Persian traditional miniature painting with anatomical and biological illustrations. These references form a visual language through which I explore the body as both subject and site of historical memory. In the most recent work, I shift toward a contemporary narrative, examining the ruptured body of today—physical, cultural, and political. This is a body in crisis. Its organs are severed, estranged from the whole, yet still tenuously linked—still performing, still striving to sustain a failing system. Some of these organs are speculative, imagined for a body yet to come: a future form born from catastrophe, assembled in the aftermath of a blast.