siyah : an iranian childhood (I)
this work looks back at a childhood spent being “سیاه : siyâh”, '[/si:ˈjɒ:h/]’, black, in Tehran of the nineties.
blackness in Iranian reality is often forced into silence or treated as an exception, flattened into exotic detail rather than recognized as a lived history. this kind of erasure doesn’t only erase individuals, it rearranges the archive itself, deciding which bodies belong to the national stories and which must move to the margins to be survivable. with this work, i weave myself, as siyâh— into mainstream narratives to interrupt that bargain: blackness was never peripheral to Iranian cultural imagination.
in this work, i center siyâh as an embodied truth, rather than an aesthetic, by combining a selection of stamps that my grandfather (1920-2013) collected, with my own photography, and grounding it in historical context to create a visual and archival tension: material that carries lineage and motion, evidence that carries weight, and imagery that refuses to drift into abstraction.
blackness here is not as an absence but as a thread that has always been there and is no longer going to wait to be added in the mainstream.
this is the first segment in a larger series on siyâh : a childhood that spans across different childhood.
to support, siyah : a childhood, reach out [contact].
My grandfather was born in Isfahan in 1920. It is him who bought this stamp to add it to the stamp collection he left behind after passing.
rest in wisdom papi.
siyah : an iranian childhood
مالکوم و من
Malcolm x i
Iran was the first country in the world to issue a stamp featuring Malcolm X. The year was 1984 and my grandfather made sure to add it to his collection.
From, siyah : an iranian childhood, a series that explores blackness within Iranian childhood.
کلاهقرمزی
the one with the red hat
I used to love eating over at khaleh mariam. She’d let me watch television and her parrots always said something that’d upset my mami to laughter.
siyah : an Iranian childhood.
A famous Iranian fictional puppet character, کلاهقرمزی : kolah ghermezi : the one with the red hat.