LIFE

I was born in Ahwaz, Iran in 1976 in the twilight years of the Pahlavi dynasty. The pro-Western monarchy of the Shah was toppled by massive uprisings in 1979, and power soon fell into the hands of the country’s Islamic religious leaders, first amongst them Ayatollah Khomeini. The loudspeakers, parades, and executions of this strange revolution were the backdrop of my earliest years. In 1980 war broke out between Iran and Iraq, a savage stalemate lasting for nearly a decade, and leaving millions dead. I have but a few vivid memories of these times. I remember sitting together on the ground of a basement with my brother and my parents and listening to the sounds of bombs dropping from above. I remember listening to the sound get closer and louder and hoping that it wouldn’t hit our house, and at the same time feeling guilty because this meant it was going to hit somebody else’s house. My father was an influential commander in the Navy and away for months at a time; my mother, head nurse of the war hospital in Tehran, worked every day as the body count mounted. Every night before the nationally broadcasted “war news” on TV they played the same melody while showing images from the front lines. Every night, when I heard this I wondered whether my father was still alive. One summer night in 1984 my mother came to my bed in my room and told me that we were going on a trip tomorrow and that we should take our favorite toys. That night, we each packed one suitcase and the next morning fled the country for Germany, where we were admitted as political refugees. Up until I was a teenager, I lived with my family in the immigrant ghetto of Hamburg. The general political climate in Germany was very active in the 80s with the lefts and German punks on one side and the neo-Nazis and skinheads on the other. As immigrants, our days were filled with the struggles of hatred and racism, and thereby our lives were in a continuous state of resistance and uprising. I remember my first day of school there in 1984, third grade, walking into the class room and looking at a group of mild featured, mostly blond kids with blue eyes and tiny noses who spoke a language I couldn’t even understand.
I felt that at every moment we were strongly reminded by something or someone that we were foreigners. This often took extreme forms.

My mother was almost strangled to death by skinheads in the subway, and my father’s shop was destroyed on crystal night and “signed” by swastikas. Even when it didn’t come to this, there was a pervasive atmosphere of hostility. But these years in Germany were also some of the most amazing times of my life. I had gained some new form of confidence and transformed these feelings of fear and unfamiliarity into a new ground for power, the power of uprising. I felt strong and alive.

When I was 12, I started to socialize with a group of rebellious kids a few years older than me who were heavily involved in the thug-streetlife of Hamburg. They were squatters living in building along the harbor, semi-intellectuals reading Karl Marx and Charles Bukowsky, drug dealers and “professional chillers” spending their days on a flourishing hip hop scene where politics, break dancing, and graffiti were daily routines. We would hang out and have heated political discussions, steal Adidas, and get charged by the music of Public Enemy, BDP, Run DMC, LL Cool J, and Big Daddy Kane. One of the highlights when I was about 13 was going to a Public Enemy show. It was the Black Planet Tour in the late 80’s – it was amazing. My friends and I attended demonstrations all the time – against apartheid, for women’s rights in Iran and of course against skinheads in our own neighborhoods. Groups like Public Enemy, NWA and BDP were speaking in a voice we could relate to, even when we didn’t always understand the lyrics word for word. But it was through translating their music (and also Madonna’s “True Blue” and Michael Jackson’s “BAD” album) that I started to learn English. In 1991, A couple of years after the Berlin Wall went down, the situation for refugees took a turn for the worse and my parents decided it was time to move again, this time to Los Angeles. In the 1980s, Beverly Hills had become an affluent Mecca for the Iranian Diaspora. My family was no longer affluent, and did not become so in America. I grew up in the margins of this society – in the slums of Beverly Hills, so to speak. I have found much inspiration in nocturnal encounters with Nietzsche, Freud, Farrokhzad, and Marx. What follows are some thoughts on terrorism which will hopefully make it easier to understand the images I create and work with.

Education:
BA in Psychology, UCLA 2000
BA in Philosophy, UCLA 2000