Tehran, The Apocalypse is a work that I created in Tehran, during the brutal government crackdown against protesters in 2011.

After the birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the revolutionary party institutionalized violence as an expression of faith. Publishing images of opponents’ bullet-riddled bodies in national papers and the displaying the spectacle of public executions in front of the masses are the examples of how the government has normalized State violence in Iranian society.

Here, I have attempted to push my limits and experimentally put myself within an extremely uncomfortable and disorienting situation to examine whether I would be able to engage in such an act of violence; to challenge my settled assumptions of what I might be capable of.

Having stepped into a full vulnerability, paradoxically, this time as the subject, my body becomes a zone of indiscernibility: the suffering animal becomes me, and, as I suffer, I myself become the animal.