“Home–coming” is my photographic exploration of Calgary, rooted in my experience of migration. It explores how time and the medium of photography can be used to generate new memories and make new roots in a place that is not yet home. This camera-led exploration has helped expand my sense of belonging, allowing me to embrace the here and now and transform my perceptions of Canada, making it feel like a “home.” 

I am influenced by Pictorialist photographers of the late nineteen century. Metaphorically, this experimental process parallels my experience as an immigrant in Canada; it takes time and needs patience and frustration-tolerance, but it opens new territories to discover. This intensive and immersive process has offered me artistic and emotional control over developing my photographic images. I am using my hand and rendering each print a unique image that cannot be reproduced, even when printed from the same negative. Photographic images, and specifically Platinum prints, are very stable, but memories are not. We might recall some memories accurately, while some parts have been changed or forgotten. Similar to my experience, these photographs live on a threshold, existing between incompleteness and becoming whole.


Home–coming

People

Abandoned

As an Iranian immigrant, my experiences of mobility and settlement have been accompanied by a feeling of ambiguity about being simultaneously here and there, causing complex emotional entanglements in relation to place, people, and relationships.1  I am confronted with endless internal struggles in trying to establish a “marriage” between two homelands and two self-representations. I feel neither here nor there but in a midway state of in-betweenness.

“Somewhere In-Between”2 represents the experience of living in-between and what it feels like to be simultaneously in two places; it explores the entangled relationship between physically being in a place while being mentally/virtually present in multiple places. I use walking as a metaphor for my journey; it is like a liminal time and space, a place where I am on betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown—no longer where I was, but not yet where I will be. I invite the audience to walk with me in-between this liminal space and time and experience living in between.





1. Fathi, M. (2021). Home-in-migration: Some critical reflections on temporal, spatial and sensorial perspectives. Ethnicities, 21(5), 979–993.
2. Daskalaki, M., Butler, C. L., & Petrovic, J. (2016). Somewhere In-Between: Narratives of Place, Identity, and Translocal Work. Journal of Management Inquiry, 25(2), 184–198.

Somewhere In Between 

“Liminal Self”, explores themes of identities that people struggle with in today’s world full of paradoxes. Liminality is defined as a subjective state of being on the “threshold” of or betwixt and between two different existential positions. Reflection has the same meaning as liminal space in my mind. These images can be so close to reality, and yet, they can be so far, a paradox that can be so confusing. It reminds me of wandering between who we are and what image we show of ourself.

Liminal Self

This collection is a free and modern interpretation of the Last Supper of Christ painted by Leonardo da Vinci. The painting represents the scene of the Last Supper of Jesus with his apostles, as it is told in the Gospel of John. The question is if Christ had risen in the modern life, how many apostles would have been sitting with him at the table?

The Last Supper in the Passage of Time

Analogue

Black and White

In moving to Canada, part of me was left behind in my motherland, and since my arrival, I am transforming into a person who is no longer there nor here but between two homelands, two cultures, and realities. I started struggling with a tentative sensation, being situated in-between, between my unreachable past and my uncertain future. 

In the installation of Neither here nor there, I intermingled my photographs of Calgary with my photos from my homeland, Iran, to explore the feeling of in-betweenness and ambiguity that has troubled me since I moved here. It is an attempt to achieve a sense of belonging in a place that is not yet home. It also includes a family memory video that is projected into the photos. In the exhibition, I  invite the audience to walk through this liminal space and identify with my everyday experience travelling between time and memory, entering a world of uncertainty, the ambiguous state I occupy.

Neither here nor there

"Memory objects" explores immigrants' sense of homesickness as it is echoed in their cherished belongings. The day I decided to pack my belongings for Canada, the first big question I struggled with was "what to take and what to leave." With the impossibility of bringing everything with me, I chose objects with which I had a close emotional bond and those that could represent my national artistic background from Iran. Soon I realized these treasured items are part of my identity, and they are here in Canada with me. 

In this project, I photographed fellow immigrants' cultural artifacts and objects that function as "transitional objects" and help bring what has become geographically "too far" a bit nearer.1
I also asked them to write the story behind the objects to allow the viewers to identify with their feeling of missing.



 1- Akhtar, Salman. "A Third Individuation: Immigration, Identity, and the Psychoanalytic Process." Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 43, no. 4 (1995): 1051–1084.



Memory objects

Cityscape

On 19 January 2017, a fire started on the ninth floor of the Plasco building in downtown Tehran. The building completely collapsed after about 3 hours of burning while a large number of firefighters were still trying to put out the fire inside and outside the building. Some of the firefighters were stuck under the rubble caused by the collapse. 
Sixteen heroes lost their lives in the Plasco building fire. I was there from the first hour of the disaster, having hope for their survival. However, after nine consecutive days, nobody survived. This collection is my documentary narrative of days full of fear and hope.



 

Sixteen heroes

About 90 percent of Iran’s population consists of Shiite Muslims. Especially after the Iranian Islamic revolution, religious ceremonies and rituals have become popular. This series examines different religious ceremonies held in Iran.
Religious ceremonies are often something like mourning, and for me, it is not the mourning but the customs it generates; when they are enacted, the rituals are interesting and full of surprises. In this photo series, I record the moods and souls of people alone in the crowd. 

Ritual

Frame, light, colour, and space are all ready! The theatre looks like pictures waiting to be discovered and captured. Yet, every photographer makes their own discoveries. While the set is the same, the pictures are not. For me, theatrical scenery is an exaggerated tableau of life itself, and taking photos of it, is like recording those moments of life we miss in the routine of everyday living. Every picture has a unique story, separate from the main plot of the show.

Missing Moments

The mind of girls in this collection doesn’t have developed according to their age and their physical growth and that is exactly why they have been excluded from the society. This unasked-for similarity has brought them together. But being together has not lessened the depth of their loneliness. There was something in their eyes beyond what camera could capture. Maybe it was a question to ask: where in the world are, they left behind and what is their share of life?!

Mitra Samavaki

Home–coming