Negotiating Home, Urban Space, Nostalgia, and Diasporic Identity Through Art and Research

The first student project awarded from the Sarshar Diaspora research grant. Undergraduate Roya Ahmadi, BS Human Biology '25, spent the summer of 2022 in New York City conducting research and working on several art projects. 

"My experience completing an independent art project supported by the Iranian Studies Program in the summer of 2022 helped me self-identify as an artist and laid the groundwork for my current art practice. My primary project while I was in New York was a large oil painting, though I also completed two other smaller scale oil paintings to practice representing human figures and experiment with color palettes. That summer I also connected with a San Francisco based artist who helped me structure my weekly practice and gave me feedback on my paintings and ideas. I also did some research for Dr. Manijeh Moradian to support a book project she was starting that summer that focused on Iranian diaspora artists making work about transnationalism. I found articles and papers that discussed the work of the artists she was focusing on and filed them using the citation software Zotero. The research was a huge learning experience for me and exposed me to the work of artists who have become great sources of inspiration for my work.

This painting depicts a group of women that I saw gathered at the Imamzadeh Saleh near Tajrish Bazaar in Tehran. I visited Iran for the first time since I was two years old during the summer of 2022 on a trip with my mother. Iranian identity has always been incredibly important to my art practice. In fact, I first started to paint as a means of processing my identity as an Iranian-American who only knew Iran through stories that my parents told.

I watched the elderly women sit down, take glass tea cups out of their bags, and place a spread of food in front of them to share. They were huddled together, leaning in to hear a story one of the women was telling. Next to them, people filed in and out of the shrine to pay their respects. I was shocked by the proximity of this ancient religious site with the hustle and bustle of the city. The sound of the adhan echoed through the busy bustling alleyways of Tajrish Bazaar nearby. These elderly women had carved out a space of peace to come together to gossip and share food and stories.

I placed the image of these women huddled together in the foreground and depicted figures of women sleeping in the mosque behind them. In Iran I found so much beauty in how places of worship were transformed into places of rest. Despite the fact that in Islam it is seen as a good thing to be in prayer for so long that your place of prayer also becomes a place of rest, security guards in the mosque would come in every so often and chastise people for sleeping and try to kick them out. The women’s section of the mosque blurred the line between a public and private space. The public space (outside, under the gaze of the police) is adversarial to women in Iran and requires concealment and caution. But the private, domestic space can also be impacted by patriarchal expectations that also force women to conceal their true selves. In this way, the mosque, which is neither the home, nor the outside world is transformed into a space of rest and community. I admire the resistance of women in Iran who carve out spaces to come together and find joy."