one thing is certain and the rest is lies is a continued exploration on navigating Queer culture as a person connected to the Iranian diaspora in so-called Canada. My practice involves connecting with my Iranian heritage through traditional forms of art such as Persian miniatures, Mughal miniatures, and illuminated manuscripts. Persian miniatures, which were often created to accompany stories and poetry, included common visual elements such as intricate patterns, high horizon lines, symbolic fauna and flora, flat 2D compositions, skewed perspectives, and disruptive architecture. I describe these architectural elements as “skewed” and “disruptive” as the perspectives often lack visual rationality through flatness and a lack of vanishing points. Using these formal visual elements and the poetic nature of the source material as a reference point, I aim to bring these illustrations into a physical space through interdisciplinary practice. My intentions are to disrupt these traditional forms to establish an intimate space as a means of queering these spaces.

By queering spaces through imagery derived from traditional Persian miniatures, I critique the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Iran. These historical artifacts often told poetic stories of royalty, love, battle, and allegory through a gaze where it uplifted the powerful people who commissioned these works. This practice was also controlled by the schools or guilds that taught such artistic forms, thus limiting these narratives and who could share them. This interests me as it resembles the historic and current exclusion of queer narratives in art, culture, history, and in many societies. I relate this to the ways Queer people are invalidated, erased, and willfully disregarded by the current government of Iran, the contemporary location from where much of this historic practice derives.

To “queer space”, I allude to how Queer identity demands openness, fluidity and re-imagining heteronormative constructs. Designer and architect Jaffer Kolb comments on queerness as, “an open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning.” With that in mind, I attempt to render the ethereal illustrations and poems from traditional sources in a contemporary and physical space. By transforming the metaphorical architectural constructs that surround us, I assert queerness to counter dominant structures that seek to invalidate and erase queer narratives. Allied to this spatial investigation I consider the diaspora of Iranians who have fled, and are fleeing, for safety and freedom. This work reflects on culture, tradition, queerness, and the ongoing displacement of queer Iranians or the methods in which queer Iranians and other marginalized groups navigate existing in oppressive spaces.