The Flowers of Exile started in early 2026, during a time when the internet was down and silence felt heavy across Iran. I couldn't connect with my friends like I used to, so I invited them to my studio. We didn't talk much; instead, we just sat for hours and looked at each other. I painted them in poses that reminded me of our family photo albums from the 90s.

To make the backgrounds, I repainted pieces of my own older work, and the works that I had collected from my other artist friends. It was my way of saying goodbye to my studio, trying to make sense of the path I’d been on and preparing for the possibility that I might have to leave. Every friend brought a flower, and as I painted them, it hit me: the flowers and the people were exactly the same. Both are beautiful, fleeting, and fragile.

I named the series The Flowers of Exile, Golhaye Ghorbat in Persian, as a tribute to the musicians and artists who were forced to leave Iran after the 1979 revolution. Even though they were gone, they kept our culture alive from afar. I felt that same ache. My subjects and I were still in our homeland, but we felt like we didn't belong anymore; we were living in a kind of exile while still at home.

These portraits are my record of that time. They are about the grief, the beauty, and the quiet realization that, in this era of history, we are all just trying to stay grounded while everything around us feels like it's shifting for the worse.