Dont Burn Please, 2012
This piece was created during a two week workshop, in which six Iranian artists along with five international artists executed their personal project in a shared environment.
My initial idea was to have an information desk and an empty bookshelf. I wanted to conduct a two weeks research on American- Iranian conflict and fill the bookshelf with articles, essays, interviews and other literature covering the topic.
The idea was rejected by the organizers to prevent the potential problems that could be caused as a reaction to a topic that has been a taboo in Iran for the last three decades or so. Therefore, I built a bookshelf filled with enclosed boxes. The audience has no access to the content of the boxes. Boxes are engraved with ambiguous general titles that are open to interpretation and signify or provoke a different experience for each person.
In a more general sense, the idea implies a state of mind in which something has become censored, forbidden, or dangerous to think of. It creates a question about the identity of what is censored and boxed. What is it that is forbidden? Each person finds a different answer to the question which is based on his or her own experience.