Harvest (Tehran Series) considers belonging as something continually negotiated between places, memories, and forms of attachment. Undertaken during a self-assigned six-month residency in Tehran, the project emerged from a sustained engagement with the city through walking, performance, and the accumulation of material traces. Rather than approaching Tehran as a fixed site of origin, the work considers the city as a shifting terrain in which familiarity and estrangement coexist.
The performative process followed routes across socially, historically, and politically distinct areas of the city, moving between affluent districts and neglected neighbourhoods. Through frottage, pavements, manhole covers, and other urban surfaces became sites of encounter, their patterns and textures transferred onto canvas. Paint, dust, and residue accumulated through this process, allowing the physical surface of the city to register as both material and record, forming an embodied and partial reading of a city shaped by successive layers of time, use, memory, and change.
Each work takes its title from the location where it was made, allowing the individual sites to remain present while opening onto the histories and narratives embedded within them. The resulting canvases hold together personal movement and collective terrain, treating the act of moving through the city as a way of reading, recording, and inhabiting it.
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Photographic documentation of Harvest by Arya Abolhassani.
