This series is based on photographs I took during my fieldwork in Iran in fall 2024 and spring 2025, in the cities of Ahvaz and Tehran. The photographs document urban spaces, walls, official signs, memorial frames, inscriptions, and sections of cemeteries, especially the martyrs’ sections.
This project is part of an ongoing attempt to bring together anthropology and visual art in order to think more carefully about political death in Iran. It is not only a finished visual series, but also a process of learning how to work with images, materials, and mixed-media techniques as part of anthropological research. Through this process, I am experimenting with how field photographs can be transformed into visual objects that carry texture, damage, repetition, inscription, and material presence.
As an anthropological project, the series approaches these images as part of a wider field of social and political life: cemeteries, city walls, portraits, flags, inscriptions, frames, ritual objects, and public memorial infrastructures. As a mixed-media art project, it works with the photographs as material fragments, layering them with texture, thread, fabric, stains, marks, paper, and written signs. The aim is not simply to illustrate death, but to explore how death is mediated, framed, touched, repeated, and made meaningful through visual and material forms.
In these images, the martyr’s body is not present only in the grave or in the portrait. Its presence extends through architecture, walls, frames, inscriptions, plaques, flags, and urban infrastructures. The city becomes a surface for preserving, repeating, and reproducing the name and image of the martyr. The cemetery, likewise, is not simply a place of burial; it is part of a visual, material, and political system that keeps the killed body within public memory.
This series is also concerned with the role of visual culture in how people come to understand political death. In Iran, martyrdom is not only a religious or political category; it is also a visual language. It is encountered through posters, murals, framed portraits, cemetery layouts, public signs, ritual objects, and repeated inscriptions. These visual forms teach people how to see the dead, how to remember them, and how to place them within larger narratives of sacrifice, legitimacy, nation, and political belonging.
By combining field photography with mixed-media interventions, this work asks what happens when ethnographic images are not treated only as documents, but also as materials to be worked through. The added textures, stitches, stains, and fragments do not attempt to reconstruct reality. Rather, they make visible the processes through which death becomes public, political, and aesthetically organized. They also allow me to think through the body, the image, and the city in ways that writing alone may not fully capture.
At the intersection of art and anthropology, this series asks how visual forms shape the social life of the dead. It treats images not only as evidence, but as active sites of interpretation and experimentation. Through this work, I am trying to understand how political death is displayed, governed, mourned, aestheticized, and made meaningful in contemporary Iran—and how visual art can open another way of thinking anthropologically about death, memory, and public life.
Fall 2024 / Spring 2025
Ahvaz and Tehran, Iran
Urban spaces, walls, memorial images, and martyrs’ cemetery sections