At the outbreak of the war, when the first explosions struck near the Supreme Leader’s residence in Tehran, I was in my studio nearby, working on a large-scale landscape painting. The work was part of an ongoing engagement with mountains and geological forms; landscapes shaped through slow oil-glaze techniques and layered accumulations of color.

I continued painting during those days, partly as a way to remain attentive to material process amid instability. The mountains in my works are never purely natural forms; they carry traces of extraction, labor, and circulation. In recent years, my research around sugar and color has led me toward the colonial histories embedded within materials themselves: sugar, indigo, dyes, and pigments as substances tied to trade routes, slavery, and systems of global exchange.

The painting eventually traveled with me from Tehran to Tabriz and later to Europe. Looking back, it now feels less like a document of war than a record of persistence through material practice; an attempt to remain engaged with landscape, surface, and matter while larger political and historical forces pressed in from outside