Man-Made Objects, 2022

Man-made Objects [اشیا مصنوع] is a one-night site specific installation that invites the audience to a glass melting workshop outside of Tehran. for this project, I use glass as an artificial object with a natural base. Glass is not found in nature as a raw material like wood or stone. But, it is created by heating the mixture of silica, sodium carbonate, calcium oxide, and other materials. Using this object as where culture and nature meet, I metaphorically refer to Bruno Latour’s concept of Hybrid objects in relation to the Anthropocene. Emphasizing the idea of speculation, the darkness becomes a reference to the concept of withdrawal and the weirdness of reality. In addition, the audience interacted with the piece and the whole space one by one. By throwing my audience into an unknown and weird world that I have created and giving them agency, I want my audience to explore the whole space and interact with it while being vulnerable and curious about what is going to happen. My audience becomes an active part of the piece as oppose to a mere passive viewer.