And left to right.

Not once, but countless times.

And then, words start to blur. I can't find the words to describe it. 

I want you to feel how I feel.

I want you to feel like I do when the search is pointless. 

I want you to go back and forth.

tongue-tied

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Navigating the Creative Process

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Barriers in Research-Creation

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Audience & Exposure

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Proposal:

This exposition focuses on an ongoing research-creation project that explores the intersection of language, translation, and artistic production. As a bilingual, first-generation immigrant, my practice has been shaped by the complexities of navigating multiple languages. This project asks: How can bilingualism serve not only as a constraint, but also as a conceptual and material strategy in contemporary art-making and writing?

While bilingualism offers creative opportunities, it also presents significant challenges—particularly in how language influences artistic process, authorship, and the communication of ideas in both personal and institutional contexts. For years, I compartmentalized my two languages—Farsi and English—using them in separate realms of writing and artistic work. Recently, however, I have begun to explore how these languages—and the identities they embody—can coexist, inform one another, and at times overlap.

This inquiry unfolds through both artistic creation and academic reflection, drawing from daily life as a site of negotiation between cultural identity and language. Engaging the work of Lauren Fournier and Michel de Certeau, I investigate how language shapes our understanding of routine, subjectivity, and authorship. I also explore how Farsi and English function not only as tools of communication but also as visual, performative, and conceptual elements in my practice.

A central method in my work is journaling, which I view as both a therapeutic ritual and a creative engine. This practice offers a lens through which to examine the impact of bilingualism on memory, narrative, and research itself. It also raises questions about the boundaries between private and public language—between the intimate and the shareable—offering room for both self-reflection and collective dialogue.

In this experimental writing, I aim to confront the lack of agency I have often felt as a bilingual artist navigating academic and artistic institutions. I propose a translingual approach that treats language not just as content, but as material—fluid, unstable, and generative. This work contributes to broader conversations on language, translation, and cultural hybridity in contemporary art, particularly within research-creation and artist writing practices.

Throughout the exposition, I will reference both completed and in-progress works that incorporate language through varied approaches—ranging from mixed media and installation to book arts and conceptual publications. Farsi text will be interwoven throughout the writing—appearing visually in the background or alongside English text as translation, disruption, or echo. I have provided a table of contents with descriptions of each section and samples of artworks that will anchor key discussions.

The writing itself will take a hybrid form: a back-and-forth narrative resembling an internal dialogue, which visually plays with the right-to-left and left-to-right scripts of Farsi and English. This formal interplay acts as a metaphor for the ongoing shift of living between two languages, cultures, and ways of being—foregrounding a fragmented, translational mode of expression as both a method and an aesthetic.

CV

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Language as Artistic Medium

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(Intro) The Confusion

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Life in Writing 

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When a word escapes the unnecessary touch of my tongue.

And I suddenly become tongue-tied in both languages I know.

To feel the sheer frustration of running from right to left. 

I want you to feel it in your bones.