Here & Elsewhere 

Eden: That became your Family / Stories from Childhood series. Why combine your mother’s photographs with those rug samples?

 

Paria: My mother’s life passes through so many eras of Iranian history: the Pahlavi years, the revolution, the years after. Looking at her photographs was like looking at a record of how women’s identities were formed and controlled by images.

 

At the same time, I kept thinking about the history of carpets. Women have woven their own languages into rugs for centuries: symbols, secrets, messages meant for someone who might one day read them. When I began screen-printing my mother’s photographs onto the backs of those found rug samples, I was joining those gestures, layering her archive, her memories, onto a surface that already carried its own history of labor and storytelling.
It was also a way of sitting with memory, of allowing myself to process immigration and longing through a material that already carried women’s stories. Printmaking became the bridge between archive and body, between image and texture.

 

Cora: The images in that series are partially obscured or abstracted. How much of the original narrative do you want a viewer to see?

 

Paria: I don’t think I can control that, and I don’t want to. I like that the image changes as it’s transferred to the back of a carpet, the side that isn’t meant to be seen. That distortion feels honest.

When I look at my mother’s archive, there are things I recognize and things I’ll never know. I like that uncertainty. I prefer to give fragments rather than full information, to invite viewers to imagine a story for themselves. That’s how memory works; it’s partial, textured, shifting.

 

Eden: In Safety Matches, the image itself becomes volatile, printed on red phosphorous paper that can ignite when struck. There’s something both delicate and violent about that interaction. Can you talk about the gesture and how the medium shaped the work?

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Paria: Every image in that series could be called a trigger, something that can start a revolt. One shows a page from Samad Behrangi’s children’s book, another the smile of a woman, another a screenshot from a video call with my mother showing me Valiasr Square in Tehran. I was here, in New York, and she was there, standing in the middle of that square holding her phone up so I could see the city. That moment stayed with me: the distance, the connection, the fear, and the beauty of it all at once.
I made the work during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. I was sitting with so many emotions – fear, anger, sadness, hope – and trying to hold them together. The match became a metaphor for that moment.

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Safety matches need the right friction to ignite. People are the same; we just need the right spark to rise.
The prints are silk-screened onto sheets of red phosphorous paper, the same material used on matchboxes. When you strike them, they burn. The image literally disappears. 

 

I was thinking about that fragility, about what it takes for an image to be seen, and what must be lost in that process. Each photograph has to experience a kind of violence to become visible. That feels close to how visibility works for women, for immigrants – there is always a cost to being seen.

The destruction is also a form of release. When the image burns away, it leaves behind a trace, an afterimage. It’s frightening and beautiful at the same time, the way grief can be.

 

Cora: Your newer etchings, like Houses (with no name), feel very different: simple geometric forms, grids, and small words. How did that begin?

Paria: I still think in images, but now words have become images too. I start with dots, connect them, almost like a game. It’s a way of mapping memory. Sometimes I invite others to play on the same plate so their marks stay with mine.
While I draw, words come up in both English and Farsi. English isn’t my first language, so every word appears as a picture. On the plate, words and drawings share the same value, they’re pressed together. There’s no hierarchy.
I spent a year trying to learn how to draw a house.

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It sounds simple, but it took me a long time. Maybe because I don’t know where my house is anymore. Immigration means living between languages, between systems that are both oppressive in different ways. That sense of displacement never fully leaves.

When I draw, I feel like a child again, curious, unguarded. The sculptor Joel Shapiro once told me, “Don’t we all just want to be children in our practices?” I think about that a lot. Drawing lets me return to that openness while still thinking about memory, home, and care.

 

Eden: Improvisation seems to be a common thread in your work.

 

Paria: Improvisation is imagination. It’s freedom. I listen to a lot of jazz and study how musicians move within and beyond structure. There’s always a language they can return to, but within it they find space to wander. That’s how I work, too.

 

When I start a print or a drawing, I know the basic structure, but the rest comes from curiosity. Improvisation keeps the work alive; it reminds me that making is a way of thinking.

 

I just want to be free.

 

And I want that for the viewer, as well. When someone spends time with a piece, I hope they start imagining what isn’t there, what’s missing, what’s hidden, or what connects to their own life. I don’t offer conclusions. I offer a space for reflection.

 

Eden: What does it mean for you to be part of Here & Elsewhere?

 

Paria: I’m so happy to be in this exhibition. Many of us have known each other for years. Seeing our works together feels like a continuation of our conversations.
Printmaking is slow, it’s repetitive, it requires care. Those qualities mirror what this show is about: grief not as an ending but as transformation, as an act of collective attention.

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