Enforced Disappearance reinterprets and recontextualizes historical photographs from the 1979 Iranian Revolution, inviting viewers to critically engage with the ideological structures that have defined Iran’s modern history.
By deliberately removing Imam Khomeini, the central figure and symbolic leader of the revolution, from archival images, the work transforms absence into a form of presence. His erasure becomes a hauntological gesture, one that reveals how power continues to operate through what is unseen, unspoken, and suppressed. The empty spaces left behind are not voids but haunted sites, echoes of what could have been, spectral reminders of repressed histories and unrealized futures.
Through this act of visual and conceptual subtraction, the project challenges the sanctified narrative of the revolution, asking: What alternative futures were silenced beneath the official image? What remains when the image of authority is removed?
Enforced Disappearance situates itself between memory and forgetting, between history and speculation. By transforming the archive into a spectral space, it reclaims the possibility of reimagining Iran’s past, not as a fixed record, but as a living terrain where ghosts of the revolution continue to speak.
Ultimately, the project becomes an act of visual exorcism, a way of confronting the ideological ghosts that still govern the present and of summoning new imaginaries from within the ruins of disappearance.