Remains

My practice uses photography to explore the body as a site where memory, perception, and the surrounding environment intersect. Rather than treating photography as a means of documenting reality, I am interested in how it can make uncertain or invisible relationships perceptible.

Remains began with stories of Peri from Central Asian and Persian traditions and with the swan as a figure of transformation between human, animal, and spiritual realms. Rather than reconstructing these stories, I approach them as fragments of cultural memory that can be reimagined through a contemporary body. Photographed during a dance performance, the work transforms fleeting gestures into traces in which ancestral imagination and present experience overlap.

In relation to Future Memories, the work asks what remains when forms of intangible heritage can no longer be preserved intact. As rituals, beliefs, and forms of ecological knowledge disappear or change, memory may persist not as a complete narrative, but through gestures, bodily perception, and a residual sense of connection with the more-than-human world.

By bringing these traces into the present, Remains considers memory as something continually reshaped rather than simply inherited. It asks whether fragments of forgotten relationships between humans, animals, and the land might not only recall the past, but also offer ways of imagining different ecological futures.