2025
Presented at Shaar Gallery – Tehran & 44th Fajr International Theater Festival
Three Separate Works brings together three independent pieces that, on the surface, share no common medium, scale, or mode of presentation: Rhinoceros, an image printed on toilet paper; Waiting for Godot, an installation situated inside an elevator; and Man Equals Man, a two-player card game. Yet at a deeper level, these works are three variations on a shared question: when the performer disappears, where does the performance continue?
In this project, performance no longer resides in the actor’s body but is transferred to situations, objects, systems, and viewers. The artwork is not something to be merely observed; it becomes a condition to enter, use, wait within, or act through. Each piece experiments with a form of “performance without a performer,” where the audience—willingly or not—finds themselves inside the operative structure of the work.
Here, performance unfolds not on stage but within everyday rituals, in the suspension of a transitional space, or through the logic of a game. In this sense, Three Separate Works is not a set of unrelated projects, but three cuts through a continuous line of thought concerned with the shifting positions of performance, artwork, and spectator.
The project was first presented at Shaar Gallery in Tehran and later at City Theater as part of the 44th Fadjr International Theater Festival.
A fiction film that dismantles cinematic structure, authorial authority, and the language of instruction from within; a fragmented narrative unfolding in a café, turning into a satire of education, genre, and power.
A multi-source film-event emerging from an informal gathering that turns the screening into a staged situation, addressing the art academy through humor and structural irreverence.
A video-performance in which Hamlet and Ophelia, pale and motionless like corpses, become surfaces onto which the narrative is projected. The story is not performed but testified through video: a post-tragedy trial questioning responsibility, misunderstanding, and blind belief.
A performance structured as a PowerPoint lecture that draws on the tradition of Persian pardeh-khani, staging a non-Aristotelian poetics through the mechanisms of explanation, pedagogy, and authoritative speech.
A film emerging from informal conversations about horror cinema that places the viewer within a genre-based expectation, staging fear not as an event, but as a structure of suspense and anticipation.