Choreography of Light

16mm Film, Animation

The mechanical production of the camera is articulated through the mechanics of the body. This choreographic journey of a film strip overlays the physicality of the analog filmmaking process and the anatomy of the human body. This is a symbolic study of the mechanical reproduction of light and life through film. The film's final chapter is animating the dance notation motifs of the Leban technique. A unique language for recording the choreographic movement.

Tan/Vatan

16 mm Film, Handmade Film
Tan/Vatan -Body/Homeland- is a collaborative experimental film. It is a conversation between two women and their intimate experiences of love and life.
The film embodies a symbolic form borrowed from the origin cultures of the artists, in India and Iran. Tan and Vatan are mutual words in Hindi and Persian language, sharing the same meaning and pronunciation. Artists utilize the language, the medium, and their bodies to connect and visualize their experiences while engaging with the mechanical and physical experience of 16mm and handmade film.

Nour

Film, Photo, Audio
Cinematic Sculpture
16mm B&W film, Bleach, Photographic prints

Hope lies in the light.
Imagining the possibility of the future is a radical act of hopefulness. Looking for solutions, answers, and light, one frame at a time.
There is hope in remembering and imagining.
There is hope in the present, the now and here.
And in the wild gamble of believing that another second will come after the last.

“There Will Be Light” is a film installation of a roll of directly manipulated film on a loop.
The Audio is repeating the word Noor -Light in Farsi.
This work is a meditation on the mechanical repetition of “Light” itself, the material light projected through the film, and manifested through language.

The poem The Sun Will Rise, by Forough Farrokhzad is the inspiration for this piece.

Shahr-e-No

In this two-channel video performance recorded simultaneously In Boston and Tehran, each performer occupies a specific location formerly known as a “Red Light” neighborhood. Performing in the left channel, Homa follows the lead of Mahya, her collaborator in Iran on the right, dancing the choreography they designed together. Restrained by the Islamic Republic’s law, Maya is prevented from joining Homa in movement.

In the aftermath of the 1979 revolution in Iran, women became targets of all forms of savagery. Women in the margins are the first in line to suffer these brutalities. In a deadly attack on Tehran’s neighborhood of brothels, the extremists robbed the sex workers, hauled them through the city, and burned them alive in front of rows of people. For the past several decades, women’s bodies have been banned from dancing and moving in public. This performance video is a memorial to the women of “Shahr-e No.”

Walk

Walk is a collaborative video project, initiated in 2015 right after Homa moved to the United States as a student. The limitations such as long geographical and time distance, terminating her relationships, and reshaping her communication experiences led Homa to improvise new ways of reconnection with home, friends, and family.
This project is a series of videos documenting the performance of two walkers -including the artist- in two different cities across the world, attempting to simultaneously navigate the cities following the same compass. Performers are connected through phone calls and have specific destinations to reach. Several rules and conditions lead the walkers through a process designed to form a physical-virtual connection between the bodies.
Videos are presented as two-channel installations with sound and accompanied by hand-drawn notation maps hanging on the walls.
 

Home Is Where the Fig Trees Grow

The short film Home is Where the Fig Trees Grow, unfolds a historical moment in post-revolution Iran through the story of my family. The film incorporates short films my father shot in our old family house, now occupied by Afghan refugees who fled the war years after we watched it begin on television in the same living room. The film is a conversation between my father and me as filmmakers, between here and there as home, between now and past as history, and between different visual formats and mediums of moving images. 

D.O.N.O.T.T.O.U.C.H.M.E.
 

D.o.n.o.t.t.o.u.c.h.m.e. is a response to personal experience of physical and sexual harassment.
The skin expands and folds back into itself, as frames and pixels are woven into each other.