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Passing Remains

by Mina Fouladi

My phone burns hot with 72,000 images and videos, overflowing its memory and disrupting its functionality. I keep pouring into this dying device, anticipating its exclamation of enough! My memory is flawed, and I can feel my childhood moments in Iran fading. I look at the photographs over and over until they become stale, their familiarity somehow making the moments feel further away. Yet with my 2TB cloud storage, I continue. Constantly capturing. Ensuring the hoarding can continue long after the device itself gives up.

Painting is my attempt to interrupt this cycle. It allows me to sit with these moments: small fragments of everyday life that locate me within a place. I paint from these images to slow them down; to dissect them, inhabit them and reconstruct their spatial conditions. I often start from the background, filling in what lies beneath the objects suspended in space. In this way, painting becomes an attempt not only to preserve a moment, but to understand why I felt compelled to preserve it.

This becomes particularly acute in relation to Tehran, the city where my father and mother met and my brother was born, the city I spent my childhood summers and early teenage years, the city I’m now rediscovering as an adult. I have watched familiar places and people disappear or change. What began as an impulse to document what was disappearing has gradually become an attempt to reconstruct what I have already lost. Rather than simply documenting the city’s changes, I now return those images to the city itself; painting directly onto its walls and allowing its materials, encounters and imperfections to shape the work.

My small paintings mimic the scale of the phone screen on which I reencounter them. Removed from the screen and placed onto a wall, their scale becomes relative: what once filled my field of vision becomes a tiny fragment within the physical world. I am interested in this movement between the intimate scale of the screen and the physical scale of the world.

A photograph becomes a painting. The painting becomes another image. The image moves again between surfaces and places. Each transition introduces the possibility of loss, distortion and change. Rather than preserving an image intact, I am interested in what happens when it is allowed to transform.

This movement between forms becomes physical in the concrete works. I paint onto a wall using peelable theatre paint, then remove the painted surface and cast it into concrete. The fragile skin of paint becomes embedded within a material associated with permanence and construction. Mounted with exposed steel fittings, the fragments sit somewhere between painting, object and architectural component. I think of them as prefabricated memories: images that can be installed, removed and relocated.

This idea of transition also appears in a painting of my cousin’s house, a place that is no longer accessible to me, partially concealed behind a plexi shutter. The image remains present but cannot be fully accessed.

A large painting of Tehran similarly begins at a distance, with a view seen through a friend’s car window, from a moving vehicle, through a camera and finally through paint. Each work asks what remains of a place as it passes through different forms of access, memory and material.