Thinking About Migration

Thinking About Migration, 2020 - 15’ x 10’ installation of 20 digital prints on gauze with fan

Thinking About Migration are prints of Persian rugs on gauze fabric. They blow and turn gently like ethereal spirits from a fan placed in the corner of the room that personifies the imagination of magic carpets. In old Persian stories magic carpets are woven with magic threads that are able to transport anyone to anywhere in the world instantly. The rugs, and their delicate gauzy materiality suggest bodies of Iranian migrants and the precarity of migration. Their delicate motion and scale creates an ambivalent sensation—simultaneously of overwhelming vulnerability and loss while suggesting a calm freedom swaying easily in the wind. As the wind continues to blow on these rugs the gauze ever so slowly begins to unravel itself when they move.