Diffraction Index (Asterism I & II), is a photographic, sculptural, and spatial exploration of how the body might conduct or arrange itself to touch distant objects, temporalities, and histories.

The project began as a personal crisis of representation rooted in an archive of photographs I took during a study trip to Iran three years prior, in 2012. I was bewildered by its set of cultural and historical coordinates. The country was in the middle of nuclear negotiations, yet it faced its own particular representational challenges, pivoting around the fact that it is both semiotically opaque and overdetermined. In a highly charged, occluded location where every bit of disclosure is dissected for partisan significance, I found myself photographing compulsively—an obsessive, evidentiary urge to metabolise the experience. Concerned with the country's restricted media environment as a foreigner, I photographed with a small point-and-shoot camera. I took photos of obvious “disprovals” to generalized misconceptions—ladies in chadors staring at a window display of red lacquered pumps, books on queer Jews at an inter-faith institute—but that, too, felt like playing into a trap, a never-ending lacuna.

I became deeply ambivalent about this relationship to the image. What did it mean to be steered by a desire to capture experience in a place where visualization technologies have played such a destructive role? Could I trouble the relation with imaging? What could the surface of an image implicitly mourn or withhold, even as it discloses? On the mountain, fingers frozen, condensation clouding my glasses, I decided to vary control of capture. I swung my camera around and pressed the shutter at random. The resulting print—an almost Bruegel the Elder-like photograph of Tehran schoolgirls frolicking in the snow—was the only shot I took of the scene. Alongside views of the Ayatollah Khomeini museum, these images became as much about spectatorship as their ostensible subjects. Rather than seeking to reveal a hidden truth about Iran, they attend to the limits of documentary vision: what images aggressively assert and yet fail to capture, and how our very acts of looking are structured by inherited regimes of representation.

Diffraction Index (Asterism I) moves this crisis out of the image and into the room, implicating the physical body and its prosthetics to process what the photograph withholds.

Beside the print, a book of Yoga asanas lies open, lightly touched by the frayed end of a black lariat. The book is flipped to a page depicting Sutra neti—a cleansing technique of pulling a wet string through the nose and mouth to force a renewed bodily disposition. The accompanying lariat was a fixture of my daily life, used as a makeshift harness to hold myself upright and orient myself to the world. Here, these elements function as conduits of alignment and porousness. By layering the disciplinary string of the yogic archive against the binding tension of the harness, the sculpture seeks to foster new openings in the body—a vulnerability required to engage with an image whose histories remain enclosed.

What could the surface of an image implicitly mourn or withhold as it essays an evidentiary, historical presence? Diffraction Index (Asterism II) depicts the interiors of the museum, dedicated to the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the religious and political leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. It does not immediately relate spatially to Diffraction Index (Asterism I), but is meant to be its companion, like a faraway point of light.

Asterism II captures an interior hallway of a small museum dedicated to the late Ayatollah Khomeini , in Jamaran where his old house still remains, also preserved as a site of historical significance. It is a place focused on preserving a particular iconographic visual memory of the Ayatollah and his role in the events of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. In shooting this, I was interested in capturing a place obsessed with iconography and the relaying of historical weight. This photograph was shot with the intent of witnessing the place’s relationship to images. In that way it is perhaps the diffracted other of Asterism I; the other shot by chance, this one with intention, both with subjects that simultaneously disclose, withhold, and exceed the frame.