Conversation with Rasoul Moeraknejad
This conversation is not intended to be a conventional interview about an artist’s career. It does not simply review a list of works, exhibitions, books, and artistic experiences, nor does it attempt to offer a predetermined account of each stage of professional activity. Rather, it seeks to come closer to the questions and concerns that have recurred throughout this journey, changed over time, and sometimes taken on new forms.
For this reason, the questions move across different areas. Some concern art and media; others deal with time, erosion, loss, and impermanence; some with memory, the city, history, and the archive; and others with looking, the viewer, visibility, society, and power. As the conversation progresses, the questions also become more personal: the identity of the artist, working across different forms and media, the desire to continue, fatigue, doubt, failure, and the personal meaning of creation.
The answers, therefore, do not necessarily seek to construct a unified or flawless image of the artist. Some are accompanied by uncertainty; others may call for reconsideration; and at times, a question may give rise to another question rather than lead to a definite answer. Perhaps this is closer to the reality of artistic experience, because an artistic journey is rarely a collection of definitive answers. It is more often a collection of questions that change shape over time.
This text, then, is less about what an artist has made than about the questions and concerns that have compelled him to make, think, write, and continue—and that have not yet come to an end.
Perhaps, ultimately, this conversation takes place not only between an interviewer and an artist, but also between experience and reflection, work and life, and knowing and not knowing.
And perhaps this is its most important characteristic:
One asks, the other answers;
but neither is certain that the final question will actually be the final question.
July, 2026
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Interviewer: If we were to identify a common thread running through all your artistic and intellectual activities—from painting and video art to poetry, writing, research, and teaching—what might we find?
Moarek Nejad:
Perhaps it would be better not to speak of a single subject, but of a common concern—or even a continuing line of thought.
Over the course of my artistic practice, the media and forms of my work have changed, but certain questions have remained with me: What does time take away? What remains of human experience? How does memory carry the past into the present? What does an image reveal, and what does it conceal? And how far can art convey to another person an experience that has not yet found its way into language?
These questions may first appear in painting as color, form, and image; in video, through movement, time, sound, and recording; in poetry, through language and the compression of words; in writing and research, through concepts and analysis; and in teaching, through a direct relationship with another person.
For this reason, I do not see these media as completely separate paths. Each medium offers a particular way of approaching a question. Sometimes an image shows me something that I still cannot put into words. Sometimes language helps me understand what I was actually confronting in the image. At other times, research reveals the historical or theoretical context of an experience, while teaching allows me to return to the same question from a different angle.
That is why, for me, changing media does not necessarily mean changing the subject. It is more like changing the angle from which I approach an ongoing question.
Interviewer: So can we say that you were following a clearly defined path from the beginning, and that only your media changed?
Moarek Nejad:
No. If I said that I had such a clear map from the beginning, it would not be accurate.
An important part of my artistic path has taken shape over time. Some choices were conscious, while others emerged from confronting the limitations of a particular medium, new experiences, historical and social circumstances, or even a certain dissatisfaction with something I had previously made.
Only later can I sometimes see connections between different periods that I was not fully aware of while they were unfolding.
I think this is true of many artistic journeys. An artist does not always have a complete theory of what they are doing at the moment of creation. Sometimes the work comes into being before the artist can explain it, and only later does the artist try to understand what drew them toward it.
So today, when I look back at my own path, I can see connections between painting, video art, poetry, research, and writing. But I see these connections as something I discovered along the way, rather than something I designed from the beginning.
Perhaps art, for me, has always involved a movement between experience and understanding experience.
Interviewer: So can we say that your work across different media is a result of a desire for variety?
Moarek Nejad:
No, at least that is not how I experience it myself.
If it were simply a matter of seeking variety, the media would probably matter more to me than the questions I was pursuing through them. In fact, for me, it is usually the opposite: the question comes first, and the medium has to respond to it.
An experience may begin in painting, but at a certain point I may feel that the stillness of the image is not enough and that time needs to enter the work. At that point, video opens up another possibility. Or an experience may become so deeply entangled with language that an image cannot carry it in the same way, and poetry or writing enters the process.
Of course, this does not mean that one medium is superior to another. Every medium creates possibilities while simultaneously imposing limitations.
For me, a medium is both a means of expression and a boundary to expression.
Perhaps this awareness of the possibilities and limitations of different media is what has kept me from settling into a single fixed form of practice.
Interviewer: Over the years, you have worked across many different fields. Isn’t that a kind of fragmentation? Isn’t there a risk that you never arrive at a clearly defined identity in any one of them?
Moarek Nejad:
From the outside, it may indeed appear scattered. But from within my own experience, these are not completely separate paths. I see them more as different media and different ways of confronting a series of questions.
A question may initially take shape for me as an image, and then I may realize that the image alone is not enough, so I move toward video. Later, the same question may continue through poetry, writing, or research.
So, for me, this movement did not necessarily begin with a desire to be a “multidisciplinary artist.” Rather, it has often resulted from the fact that a particular medium reaches its own limits at a certain point, while another medium opens up a new possibility for continuing the question.
Put very simply, I have not moved between media merely to produce different kinds of work; I have moved because some questions refuse to stop within a single medium.
Interviewer: But isn’t that risk real?
Moarek Nejad:
Yes, it is. And I think it is a risk that should be taken seriously.
The art world tends to categorize people. When we call someone a “painter,” the audience develops certain expectations; when we call someone a “video artist,” different expectations emerge. The same is true of a poet, researcher, or teacher. These categories are useful for introducing and understanding people, but the problem begins when the label takes the place of the artist.
I prefer to regard these titles as parts of my path rather than as a final definition of who I am.
Interviewer: In that case, can we say that, across these different media, you have been searching for a “personal language”?
Moarek Nejad:
Yes, but “personal language” should not be confused with a fixed style.
For me, a personal language does not necessarily mean that all my works should look alike. An artist may have a highly recognizable visual signature, but I have been more interested in continuity of vision than in visual similarity.
A painting and a video may have nothing in common formally, yet both may pass through the same underlying concern—for example, the relationship between human beings and time, memory, erosion, or something that is disappearing.
So if I speak of a “personal language,” I mean more the way I ask questions than a fixed set of visual characteristics.
Perhaps an artist’s personal language is not simply what keeps recurring in the work. Sometimes it is what returns again and again in a different form.
Interviewer: There is a contradiction here. On the one hand, you speak of a common concern; on the other, you constantly change your medium and your way of expressing yourself. Aren’t these two things in conflict?
Moarek Nejad:
I don’t think so. Perhaps it is precisely this change of form that allows the same question to continue.
If a question is genuinely alive, it does not necessarily have to be expressed through a single language. Sometimes the change of medium itself becomes part of the response to the question.
For example, if my concern is time, video naturally offers a different way of thinking about it than painting does. If the concern is memory, archives, photographs, documents, and travel accounts may become important. If the concern is lived experience and its expression, poetry or writing may offer another possibility.
So I see this path less as a collection of scattered activities and more as one continuing question that branches into several paths.
Each medium illuminates one part of the path while leaving another part in darkness. Perhaps it is precisely what remains unresolved that keeps the movement going.
Interviewer: If you had to define several decades of your artistic activity in a single sentence, what would you say?
Moarek Nejad:
I would say that I have not been looking for a single, fixed form of expression across different media; rather, I have been searching for different ways of approaching an experience that reveals itself in a new form each time.
Painting, video art, poetry, writing, research, and teaching are not completely separate chapters for me. They are different forms of a continuing search.
But perhaps more important than that is that today I do not want to confine this path to a definitive definition. If, after several decades, I could reduce all my activities to a single title, I might lose part of the complexity of the journey.
What matters more to me is still being able to change, to see again, to ask again, and even to distance myself from things I have created myself.
Perhaps a genuine artistic journey is recognized not by arriving at a final definition, but by the ability to continue a question in new forms.
Interviewer: Time and impermanence appear throughout much of your work. Why has time become such an important concern in your artistic and intellectual path?
Moarek Nejad:
I think part of the answer has to be found in the experience of life itself.
Time is not merely a philosophical concept or a subject for artistic work. It is something we constantly encounter in everyday life. We witness changes in our own bodies, changes in people’s faces, changes in cities, the disappearance of places, changes in relationships, and transformations in memory.
Even something we imagine to be stable changes over time.
For this reason, time is not so much the “background” of life for me as a force that shapes experience itself. We have no experience outside time.
When we see something, at that very moment it is already becoming the past. Even the present, as we experience it, is already slipping away.
Perhaps this awareness of impermanence is what drew me toward images, recording, and archives.
But the important point is that recording can never stop time. An image can preserve the trace of a moment, but it cannot bring the moment itself back.
So from the beginning there has been a contradiction between preserving and losing—one that has been highly productive for me artistically and probably contributed to my writing the book The Decay in Visual Arts.
Interviewer: So can we say that your main concern is “loss”?
Moarek Nejad:
“Loss” is not, for me, an independent subject or a fixed theme that I intend to repeat throughout all my work.
Loss is more a condition that becomes visible within the experience of time. We lose something because time passes.
So, for me, loss does not only mean death or destruction. It can also mean a transformation in the form of presence. Something may no longer exist in the form it once had, yet traces of it may remain in an image, in memory, in language, or in a place.
For this reason, perhaps a more precise description of my path would not be “loss,” but rather the relationship between presence and the impermanence of presence.
Interviewer: How has this understanding affected the way you work?
Moarek Nejad:
It has made recording a fundamentally double act for me.
On the one hand, I want to preserve something; on the other, I know that preservation does not mean rescuing it from time.
This becomes particularly visible in video, because video does not merely represent time as a subject; time is present within the structure of the medium itself.
The moving image appears before our eyes, continues, changes, and disappears. Even if we watch a video repeatedly, the experience of the first viewing can never be exactly reproduced.
For me, recording has never simply been documentation. Recording is a confrontation with the question of how something can be held onto when we know that nothing can be completely separated from time.
Interviewer: Doesn’t this view of time turn your work into a kind of nostalgic art?
Moarek Nejad:
Not necessarily.
Nostalgia usually contains a desire to return to the past—as though the past were a complete, lost period to which we might wish to return.
My relationship with the past is more critical and questioning.
I am interested in the past, but not because I imagine that it can be recovered. In fact, the issue for me is that we never have direct access to the past.
Whatever gives us access to the past always comes through memory, images, documents, narratives, and interpretation.
When I look at the past, I am not only asking, “What happened?” I am also asking:
How do we remember that event today?
What remains of it?
What has been erased?
Which narratives have prevailed, and which have been pushed to the margins?
In this sense, the past is more a question of the present for me than a place to return to.
Time, for me, simultaneously contains the past, present, and future. That is why I do not experience time as something simple or linear.
Sometimes an old image can acquire a meaning in the present that it did not have at the moment it was created. A historical event may become active again in society many years later. A place may change, while its name and memory remain.
In this way, an artwork can become a kind of meeting place for different times—a place where the past appears in the present, while the present itself is experienced with an awareness of the future and of the possibility that things may be lost.
Interviewer: In that case, can art resist the erosion of time?
Moarek Nejad:
To some extent, but not in the sense of defeating time.
Art cannot stop time. It cannot preserve a person, a city, or a memory forever in its original form.
Even the artwork itself is subject to time, change, deterioration, displacement, and forgetting.
But art can carry the trace of something into another time.
That distinction is important.
I do not see art as a tool for defeating time. I see it more as a way of entering into a dialogue with time.
The work says: something was here; something was experienced; something was seen; something was lost, or was in the process of being lost.
From this perspective, art is a form of resistance, but a resistance that is aware of its own limitations.
We cannot fully restore what has been lost; we can preserve its trace, read it again, and transmit it to someone else.
Interviewer: So perhaps your central concern is not loss itself, but the relationship between preserving and losing?
Moarek Nejad:
Yes, I think that is more precise.
I have always been interested in situations in which something is simultaneously present and disappearing.
When we record something, we acknowledge the value of that presence; but at the same time, we know that the recording cannot replace the thing itself.
As a result, a relationship emerges between presence, recording, memory, and loss that has shaped an important part of my artistic and intellectual path.
I am drawn to things that carry within their very presence a sign of their own impermanence.
And perhaps this is where art begins for me:
in the attempt to see, to record, and to share something that we know we cannot keep forever.
Interviewer: You began your professional artistic practice with painting, but video art later became an important part of your path. What did you find in video that painting could not offer you in the same way?
Moarek Nejad:
I would not say that painting was no longer enough for me, or that I replaced painting with video. That would be an overly simple account.
Painting continues to matter to me in its own right.
The issue was that certain experiences and questions gradually reached a point at which time, movement, duration, and change became necessary to them.
In painting, the viewer can stand before the work, step back, move closer, and look again. But in video, time becomes part of the structure of the work itself.
The image appears, continues, changes, and passes before the viewer’s eyes.
That difference was important to me.
Video allowed me to work with something that I could not experience in quite the same way through painting: the passing of time itself.
So my move toward video was less a departure from painting than an expansion of questions that I could no longer pursue solely through the still image.
Interviewer: So can we say that video is, above all, a medium of time for you?
Moarek Nejad:
Yes, but I would qualify that statement.
Video is not inherently only a “medium of time.” If we put it that way, we lose many of its possibilities.
Video works simultaneously with time, looking, sound, the body, space, editing, repetition, silence, and the viewer’s relationship to the image.
What interests me is the relationship among these elements.
For example, sometimes almost nothing significant happens visually within an image, but the amount of time the viewer is required to remain with it changes the experience.
Something that might be seen within a few seconds in a photograph can become a longer, even disturbing or contemplative experience in video.
So in video, time is not simply something that is represented; it is something the viewer experiences.
That distinction is fundamental to me.
Interviewer: In that case, what place does the camera have for you? Is the camera a means of recording reality?
Moarek Nejad:
If by recording we mean that the camera simply delivers reality to us exactly as it is, then I have a problem with that idea.
I am uncomfortable with treating the camera as a kind of neutral eye.
The camera chooses, frames, excludes, determines distance, creates a point of view, and even decides—simply by being switched on or off—what will enter the image in the first place.
The camera does not merely record reality; it constructs the reality that enters the frame.
Even if I make no edits at all and simply leave the camera fixed in one position, I have still chosen where to look, what to include within the frame, and what to leave outside it.
That is why I also approach documentary images with a certain degree of caution.
An image can be a document, but being a document does not mean being neutral.
Interviewer: If that is the case, is every image simply constructed by the artist’s gaze, making it impossible to trust its relationship to reality?
Moarek Nejad:
No. Here again, I would resist such a simple binary. The fact that an image is constructed and selected does not mean that it has no relationship to reality. An event really happened; a place really existed; a face really stood in front of the camera. The point is that reality and the image of reality are not the same thing. I think we need to preserve the distance between the two.
In other words, an image is neither pure reality nor simply an invention. It is an image that, from a particular position, in a particular situation, and through a particular act of selection, makes part of reality visible. Perhaps that is why, for me, the more important question is not, “Is this image reality?” but rather: “What kind of relationship does this image establish with reality?”
Interviewer: So does that make the “gaze” more important to you than the image itself?
Moarek Nejad:
I wouldn’t say more important; I would say that it is difficult to separate the two. We usually assume that something exists first and that we then see it. But in art, the way we look plays a role in determining what becomes a subject in the first place.
When I walk down a street, hundreds of things are happening simultaneously. But my camera selects only one of them. So even before I record anything, an act of selection and positioning in relation to the world has already taken place. This does not necessarily mean taking a political position. Even choosing a wall, a window, a face, or a moment of silence is a decision.
I have always found it interesting to ask: What do we see? Why do we see it? And what, because of that very choice, remains unseen?
Interviewer: Does this issue appear in a particular way in your video art?
Moarek Nejad:
I think so, particularly in works that deal with the city, faces, memory, and history. For example, in Window: Isfahan Travelogues, the issue was not simply to show Isfahan. The question was how a city is seen and narrated over time through different gazes.
A travel writer sees one Isfahan, a historian another, a resident experiences yet another, and the contemporary camera constructs another version altogether. As a result, there is no single, unified city to which we can simply attribute all these images. Instead, we are confronted with layers of gazes and narratives.
For me, this is one of the most compelling possibilities of video: it can do more than produce a single image; it can reveal the relationships among different images and different ways of looking.
Interviewer: Is recording also a form of resistance to forgetting for you?
Moarek Nejad:
To some extent, yes, but I don’t want to romanticize it or make it sound more heroic than it really is. Recording can resist forgetting, but it cannot defeat it. An archive can preserve something, but it too may one day be forgotten. Even a work of art may remain unseen for years. So I think of recording more as a form of bearing witness than of saving or rescuing.
The camera says, “I saw this,” or “This moment existed.” But it cannot guarantee that this moment will remain alive forever. Perhaps the value of recording lies precisely in this limitation. We know that we cannot preserve everything, and yet we still choose to record something. That choice itself has meaning.
Interviewer: Is that why your video art can be considered a form of protest art?
Moarek Nejad:
Yes, but not if by “protest” we mean only the direct expression of a political position. I can consider some of my works forms of protest art, but I understand protest more broadly than political protest.
Sometimes protest means resisting something that is meant to remain unseen. Sometimes it means questioning an established narrative. Sometimes it means showing something that everyday life has repeated so often that we no longer notice it. And sometimes it means refusing established forms and conventions that have already told us how we are supposed to see a particular subject.
In this sense, video can be a medium of protest for me because it allows us to shift the gaze. But protest becomes artistic for me when it does not simply say “no,” but creates another possibility for seeing. I don’t see a great distance between protest and creation in my work.
Interviewer: What exactly is this protest or resistance against?
Moarek Nejad:
If we understand protest as resistance to whatever is presented as obvious, natural, forgotten, or established, then the concept becomes more meaningful to me.
Sometimes art protests against what is seen and what is not seen; sometimes against who has the right to tell a story; and sometimes against habits that prevent us from noticing what is right in front of us.
In this sense, resistance can be very quiet. It doesn’t always have to shout. Sometimes a prolonged image, a silence, an unusual frame, or the juxtaposition of two images that are not normally placed together can resist habitual ways of seeing.
Interviewer: So can a work be political without directly talking about politics?
Moarek Nejad:
Yes, but we should be careful here as well. I don’t want to call every work of art “political” simply because it is social in nature.
At the same time, art is always produced within a social world. What is selected, what is excluded, who is seen, whose voice is heard, and what is pushed to the margins can have social and even political consequences.
For example, if instead of recording an official or monumental image, the camera lingers on a part of the city that usually receives little attention, that choice can shift the hierarchy of visibility.
But I sometimes prefer to call this the politicization of the gaze rather than the “political nature of the work.” In other words, art does not necessarily say, “This is my political position.” Sometimes it simply makes the viewer realize: “Why have I always seen this in this particular way?”
Interviewer: What role does “exclusion” or “omission” play here?
Moarek Nejad:
For me, omission is not something that happens only during editing. It begins before the work is even produced.
When I position a camera somewhere, thousands of things remain outside the frame. When we choose a particular historical narrative, other narratives may be pushed aside. When we preserve one photograph in an archive, another photograph may never have been taken at all.
So every image, in addition to what it shows, has a relationship with an enormous number of things that remain unseen. This is very important to me, because sometimes what is absent from an image becomes just as significant as what is present.
You could even say that one of the important questions of art is: What has been left outside the frame? And then: Why has it been left outside?
Interviewer: Is this omission always conscious?
Moarek Nejad:
No, and this is very important. Some forms of omission are conscious—for example, the choice of frame, the moment of filming, or what remains in the final edit. But a large part of what is omitted may not be conscious at all.
We always look through our assumptions. Something may have become so familiar to us that we no longer see it. For example, we might pass through the same street for years without noticing something there because it has become part of the background of our lives.
The camera can disrupt this habit and turn something familiar back into an object of attention, through a process of defamiliarization. Sometimes art does not add anything new to the world; it simply makes something that already exists visible again.
Interviewer: How does protest art differ from a political statement?
Moarek Nejad:
The difference is that a statement usually seeks to communicate a position clearly and directly, whereas a work of art can create an experience of an issue.
For example, we might write a statement about historical forgetting and say, “This part of history must not be forgotten.” But instead of saying this, a work of art might place before the viewer an image of a place, a name, a sound, or a fading trace, compelling them to confront the problem of forgetting.
These are not the same. In the first case, we declare something. In the second, we draw the viewer into an experience and a question.
That is why, for me, video art can be a form of protest art, but its protest does not necessarily take the form of a slogan.
Interviewer: What role does the issue of the “official narrative” play here?
Moarek Nejad:
An official narrative may record certain aspects of reality, but the problem is that no narrative can contain reality in its entirety. Every narrative makes choices: what to emphasize, what to place at the margins, whom to give a voice to, and whom to exclude.
So rather than asking, “Is the official narrative true or false?”, I am more interested in asking: “What is present in this narrative, and what is absent?”
That question can lead us to history, politics, media, and even art.
Interviewer: Does the artist always take a position against the official narrative?
Moarek Nejad:
For me, the issue is not automatic opposition to power; it is preserving the possibility of questioning any established narrative.
An official narrative may sometimes be incomplete and sometimes deeply problematic. The artist’s role is not simply to attach labels, but to reveal layers that have received less attention within the dominant narrative.
In this sense, art can act as a critic of closure—of reducing a narrative to a single voice.
Interviewer: Could we say that the power of art exists, in some sense, within politics and government?
Moarek Nejad:
Power also operates in much more everyday places: education, media, language, the economy, universities, museums, galleries, the art market, art criticism, and even taste.
For example, who decides that one work is “valuable” and another is not? Who decides what is displayed in a museum? Who determines which artists enter the books of art history and which are left out? Who has greater access to opportunities for exhibiting and producing work?
These are all questions about the distribution of power.
Power, therefore, is not only where someone gives orders. Sometimes it is where value is assigned, choices are made, and legitimacy is granted.
Interviewer: So can art institutions also play a role in producing power?
Moarek Nejad:
Certainly. Museums, galleries, universities, festivals, critics, curators, the market, and the media are not simply neutral intermediaries. They play a role in determining what is seen, how it is seen, and what meaning it acquires.
But again, I don’t want to turn this into a conspiratorial picture. Institutions do not only suppress; they also make it possible to produce, preserve, exhibit, and transmit art.
This contradiction is more interesting to me: an institution can both enable and constrain.
A museum can save a work from being forgotten, while at the same time altering its meaning by placing it within a particular framework. A gallery can give an artist an opportunity to be seen, while simultaneously favoring certain kinds of work.
So the issue is not simply power as something “bad”; it is about understanding how power operates.
Interviewer: Can art replace the official narrative with another narrative?
Moarek Nejad:
Sometimes it can propose another narrative, but I am somewhat cautious about the word “replace.”
If we simply remove one official narrative, put another in its place, and reproduce the same structure of certainty, then perhaps all we have done is change who possesses the power to narrate.
What interests me more is for art to reveal the plurality of narratives. Instead of saying, “This is the final truth,” it can show that an event can be seen from several different positions.
This does not mean complete relativism. Not all narratives are necessarily equally valid. But there should be room for comparison, questioning, and critique.
Interviewer: So if art cannot eliminate power, what can it do?
Moarek Nejad:
I think that expectation is too great. Art can make something that power wants to appear natural and self-evident questionable again.
It can change the position of the camera. It can bring an unheard voice into the frame. It can make a forgotten image appear again. It can show that what seems “natural” is actually the result of a history and a series of choices.
These may seem like small changes, but perhaps one of the most important capacities of art is precisely this: to change the angle from which we look.
Interviewer: So one of the functions of your video art could be to confront the “habit of seeing”?
Moarek Nejad:
I accept that description, although not always and not in the same way.
We have become accustomed to an enormous number of images. Every day we encounter photographs, videos, advertisements, news, social media, and political and commercial imagery.
In such a situation, the issue is no longer simply “being seen”; it is whether we actually see.
Thousands of images may pass before our eyes, yet very few of them may truly remain within our experience. That is why art can alter the speed of looking. Sometimes it makes us stay longer; sometimes it repeats an image; sometimes almost nothing happens within the image, and this very waiting makes the viewer aware of the act of seeing.
For me, this is important: art should not only show something; sometimes it should make the very act of seeing into a question.
Interviewer: Here we might say that the resistance of video art occurs not only in its content, but also in its form.
Moarek Nejad:
Exactly. And this may be one of the important points we should not lose sight of.
If a work is about resistance but uses the same familiar patterns of looking, the same speed, the same advertising language, and the same established methods of communicating a message, it may be oppositional at the level of content while reproducing, at the level of form, the very thing it claims to oppose.
For me, form itself is part of the work’s position.
For example, choosing silence instead of music, extending the duration of a shot, removing explanatory narration, using repetition, or placing the viewer in a situation where they are forced to wait can alter their experience.
In this case, protest is no longer only in the “subject”; it also occurs in the way the viewer is made to encounter the work.
Interviewer: Can this kind of resistance actually change anything? Isn’t art ultimately too powerless in the face of power?
Moarek Nejad:
Yes. In fact, I think we have to acknowledge this limitation.
I don’t believe that a video can, by itself, change a structure of power, or that a work of art can save the memory of an entire society. If we make such claims, we are imagining art as more powerful than it really is.
But on the other hand, being powerless does not mean being ineffective.
A work might change the way a single person sees for a few minutes. Perhaps that change is very small, but art can find its meaning precisely in such small shifts.
Often, the work of art is simply to introduce a question into the viewer’s mind and prevent that question from being easily closed down with a few simple phrases.
Interviewer: In a situation where political and social images have become so abundant, can protest itself also become a cliché?
Moarek Nejad:
Absolutely. And this is one of the dangers of protest art.
If protest is constantly repeated in the same language, it can itself become a habit. The viewer knows what they are going to see, what they are supposed to feel, and even at what point they are expected to become angry or moved.
At that point, protest can become a kind of aesthetic formula.
That is why an artist has to be careful not to allow even their own protest to become a cliché. Sometimes we need to protest against the conventional forms of protest themselves.
This may be one reason I am interested in experimenting with different media and forms. If I were always to repeat the same form of protest, resistance itself would become a habit. Unfortunately, many contemporary works have fallen into precisely this cliché of repetition.
Interviewer: So for you, resistance is not only resistance against external power; it can also mean resistance to the artist becoming fixed in their own identity?
Moarek Nejad:
Yes. In fact, I think this is one of the most difficult parts of being an artist.
An artist may gradually become attached to a style, a success, or a particular image of themselves. Others may come to recognize them through that same style, while the market and art institutions may also prefer that repetition.
In such a situation, changing direction can become a kind of risk.
But if art is supposed to create new possibilities, perhaps the artist must sometimes be willing to put the security of what they themselves have created at risk.
For me, this kind of resistance matters: resistance to defining myself once and then repeating that definition for the rest of my life.
There is, however, an interesting tension here. In Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological approach to the imagination, repetition can sometimes play an important role in the way an artistic image deepens and takes shape. But I don’t see repetition as something confined to form alone.
Interviewer: What exactly is memory for you? Can we think of memory as a kind of archive?
Moarek Nejad:
Not exactly. An archive can be one of the tools through which memory is preserved, but memory itself is not an archive.
An archive usually tries to preserve, classify, and make things accessible. Memory is much less orderly, and it is certainly not always reliable. We may forget something extremely important while remembering a seemingly insignificant detail for decades.
And even an archive is not neutral. What gets recorded, what is preserved, and what is allowed to disappear are all shaped by individual and collective choices.
So I see the archive as both a place of preservation and a place of omission. Sometimes what is missing from an archive is as significant as what it contains.
Interviewer: Does this way of thinking also continue in your video work From a City in Memory: Essays and Fragments?
Moarek Nejad:
Yes, although in that work I moved more directly toward questions of personal and collective memory, mourning, the passage of time, and continual change.
The video, From a City in Memory: Essays and Fragments, is approximately forty-eight minutes long and is divided into six sections: The Silence of Memories; Mourning Shadows; Along the Course of Life; Life Sings Softly; The Sound of the Silence of History; and Endless Change.
For me, these titles are more than simply the names of six sections. They represent six different perspectives on a single question: how life, memory, mourning, history, and change overlap within a city and within our own minds.
The city is no longer simply a geographical location. It becomes a form of memory—one that is itself constantly changing.
Interviewer: Titles such as “The Silence of Memories” and “The Sound of the Silence of History” contain a certain contradiction. Why silence?
Moarek Nejad:
Because much of the past can no longer speak to us directly.
We encounter buildings, photographs, streets, and documents, but the people who actually experienced those moments are no longer there to speak about them.
So the past can be visible and inaccessible at the same time.
That is what “silence” means to me here. It is not simply the absence of sound. It is the presence of something from which we can no longer hear directly.
Interviewer: You have made several videos dealing with the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. The war also entered your work during that period. Why do you continue to return to it?
Moarek Nejad:
For me, war is not simply a political or historical subject. What interests me more is what remains of war after the war itself has ended.
A war may end militarily, but its effects can continue in memory, in the body, in families, in cities, in street names, in images, in mourning, and in the stories passed from one generation to another.
So when I have dealt with war in my work, I have not been interested simply in representing it as a historical event. I have been more interested in how an event enters everyday life and continues to exist there many years later.
In that sense, war is not only something that happened. It is something that continues to happen in its consequences.
Interviewer: In that case, does art have a responsibility to preserve the memory of war?
Moarek Nejad:
I am somewhat uncomfortable with the word “responsibility,” at least if it implies a fixed duty.
Art can preserve memory, certainly, but I don’t think art must always do so. An artist may confront the history of war, while another work may have nothing to do with it.
What matters more to me is art’s ability to question how we remember.
What do we remember? What do we forget? Who tells the story? Which image survives? Which image disappears? And through which images will future generations encounter the past?
Those questions seem to me more complex—and ultimately more important—than simply saying, “Art must preserve memory.”
Interviewer: So memory is also inseparable from forgetting?
Moarek Nejad:
Absolutely. We may not even be able to think about memory without thinking about forgetting.
If everything were preserved equally, there would be no selection. Memory always emphasizes certain things and allows others to recede.
So forgetting is not simply the enemy of memory. It is also part of the way memory works.
The situation becomes more complicated, however, when individual forgetting becomes collective forgetting, or when a society, consciously or unconsciously, chooses not to look at part of its own past.
That is where art can intervene—not by reconstructing the past completely, which is impossible, but by creating a pause:
“Wait. Have we forgotten something?”
Interviewer: So when your work deals with the city and history, are you reconstructing the past?
Moarek Nejad:
No. I would rather say that I summon the past than reconstruct it.
“Reconstruction” can suggest that we are capable of rebuilding the past exactly as it was. We don’t have that kind of access.
We encounter fragments: an image, a document, a narrative, a sound, a building, a memory, a name, a street.
We place these fragments alongside one another and allow something from the past to become visible in the present. But what emerges is not the past itself. It is a contemporary reading of the traces the past has left behind.
Interviewer: Finally, if you had to summarize the relationship between memory, the city, and history in your work, what would you say?
Moarek Nejad:
Perhaps I would begin by saying that I don’t see the city—in this case, Isfahan—as something fixed.
For me, a city is a living text. It changes, decays, accumulates memories, and eventually becomes a memory itself.
History exists within it, but not as a finished past. It returns through streets, images, buildings, bodies, names, and narratives.
And memory moves through all of these things. It preserves something, transforms something else, and inevitably loses something along the way.
Perhaps that is why the six sections of From a City in Memory ultimately lead toward a single idea: Endless Change.
No memory remains completely fixed. No city is ever exactly the city it once was. And no historical narrative retains precisely the same meaning forever.
So perhaps what I am trying to do in the face of this continual change is not to create something that can stop time, but to leave traces through which something from the past—however incomplete or transformed—can become visible again in the present.
The Viewer and the Question of Being Seen
Interviewer: The question of the “gaze” appears in many aspects of your artistic practice. Does being seen matter to you?
Moarek Nejad:
We need to distinguish between an artwork being seen and what the artist hopes to communicate through it.
Naturally, an artist wants their work to be seen. If we make something and no one encounters it, part of its potential for communication is lost.
But for me, the issue is not simply how many people see the work, or whether it makes me known. The more important question is: When people see the work, what do they actually see?
An artwork may be seen by thousands of people while the thing that mattered most to the artist goes unnoticed.
And sometimes a viewer sees something in a work from a perspective the artist never considered while making it.
So being seen does not necessarily mean being understood—or even being recognized.
Interviewer: Can we say that you expect the audience to receive the same thing you put into the work?
Moarek Nejad:
Actually, I would reject that idea.
If an artist wants to control the meaning of a work completely, the work begins to function more like a message.
I prefer the work to remain open in its relationship with the viewer.
That doesn’t mean the work has no meaning, or that every interpretation is equally valid. A work has its own context, structure, signs, and specific choices.
But its meaning does not exist only in the artist’s mind.
Once a work enters the public sphere, it enters into a new relationship with its audience.
So I don’t need the viewer to see exactly what I saw. What matters more is that the work creates something in them that makes them look again, think, or ask a question.
Interviewer: If the audience is free to interpret the work, does that mean the artist is no longer responsible for its meaning?
Moarek Nejad:
I don’t think so.
The freedom of the viewer does not mean the irresponsibility of the artist.
The artist remains responsible for their choices: what they show, how they show it, what they leave out, and what kind of relationship they create among the elements of the work.
But that responsibility is different from having complete control over how the work will be received.
I can be responsible for what I have made, but I cannot be responsible for every meaning another person may derive from it.
Those are two different things.
Interviewer: Is the audience part of the process of making the work for you?
Moarek Nejad:
Sometimes the imagined audience affects the way I make a work.
When I know that a video will be shown in an exhibition space, questions of duration, image size, sound, viewing distance, and whether the viewer can stay or leave all become important.
With video, this becomes particularly significant because the viewer does not simply encounter an image; they encounter a duration.
Someone may stay for two minutes, ten minutes, or leave without watching the work to the end.
So the experience of the work depends not only on what I have created, but also on how the viewer encounters it.
Interviewer: Do you think about how the audience will see the work while you are making it?
Moarek Nejad:
Honestly, not always.
If I think too much about the audience’s reaction from the beginning, I may turn the work into something designed primarily to attract attention.
I prefer to follow the question that brought me to the work and see where the work itself takes me.
That doesn’t mean ignoring the audience. The audience is part of the space in which the work exists. But it shouldn’t become a permanent criterion for every decision.
Sometimes an artist needs to be able to make something without knowing what the audience will do with it.
That uncertainty can itself be part of the creative process.
Interviewer: Is being seen always valuable? And what significance does this have for your video art?
Moarek Nejad:
Today, artworks are constantly competing for attention.
An image is expected to be seen quickly, understood quickly, and produce a reaction quickly.
But some works operate precisely against this logic.
They are slow. They contain silence. They don’t explain themselves. They may not even be attractive at first glance.
For me, art does not always have to compete for attention. Sometimes its value lies precisely in taking the viewer outside the economy of rapid attention.
Video can also play with the viewer’s expectation that something is going to happen.
We usually expect something to change, something to happen, or the work to move toward some kind of conclusion.
But if the image is deliberately slow, or if almost nothing happens, the viewer is forced to experience their own relationship with time.
At that point, the work is no longer only about its subject. It also becomes about the viewer’s expectations.
The viewer may begin to ask:
“Why am I still here?”
“Why isn’t anything happening?”
“Is the waiting itself the point?”
That moment interests me because the work has shifted from being simply an image to becoming an experience.
Interviewer: So perhaps your relationship with the audience is more questioning than explanatory?
Moarek Nejad:
Yes. I think that is closer to what I mean.
I don’t want to leave the audience with a set of ready-made answers.
Of course, a work should be capable of proposing something. But ultimately, I think it is more valuable when it leaves room for questions.
That is why, in many of my works, I prefer to give the audience some information while leaving other things unresolved.
The viewer’s mental participation can become part of the work itself.
I make the work to be seen, but not necessarily so that the viewer will see exactly what I saw.
I would rather they encounter it from their own position—perhaps even noticing something that I was unable to see while making it.
Art, Institutions, and Power
Interviewer: Can art itself, once it enters institutions and the market, reproduce the very thing it originally protested against?
Moarek Nejad:
Yes, and I think this is one of the serious contradictions of contemporary art.
An artwork may oppose power, the market, or an official narrative, and then enter a gallery, museum, festival, or market and be absorbed by the very system it was criticizing.
There is no guarantee, then, that art remains outside structures of power simply because it is oppositional.
Even protest can become a commodity.
That is why I think the artist also needs to remain critical of their own position.
The question is not only:
“What am I against?”
We also have to ask:
“Once what I have produced enters the art world, within what structure does it operate, and what remains of its original protest?”
That question matters because it prevents us from too quickly placing ourselves in the position of “the artist outside power.”
Desperation, Imagination, and the Future
Interviewer: Does this perspective also relate to your books, including Aesthetics of Desperation?
Moarek Nejad:
Desperation is a condition in which an individual or a society feels that its possibilities have become restricted, and that the familiar ways of dealing with things no longer work.
Under such circumstances, art can respond in at least two ways.
It can simply represent the situation, or it can try to create another possibility for seeing and thinking from within that very limitation.
From this perspective, creation can become a form of resistance to desperation.
Not because art can necessarily change external conditions, but because it can refuse to allow the existing situation to occupy the entire horizon of our imagination.
Interviewer: So can art create the possibility of imagining the future?
Moarek Nejad:
Yes. For me, this is one of the most important capacities of art.
Art does not deal only with the past and the present.
Every artwork, even when it speaks about the past, creates a possibility for imagining what comes next.
When an artist says, “It could have been otherwise,” they open a space for imagination.
Perhaps that is one of the most fundamental forms of resistance.
Power and habit often operate through the assumption:
“Things are simply this way, and they cannot be otherwise.”
Art can challenge that certainty.
Interviewer: So does art always have to be innovative?
Moarek Nejad:
No. That is another misunderstanding about contemporary art.
Newness is not valuable simply because it is new.
A work may be completely new and still have no internal necessity. Another work may draw on an old tradition while activating it from a new perspective.
For me, the central question is not whether something is new. It is whether the possibility of questioning remains alive.
Sometimes returning to an old form can be more radical than producing something that merely appears new.
We should not confuse rebellion with being strange, unfamiliar, or different at any cost.
Research and Art
Interviewer: What place does research have in all this? Is research separate from your art?
Moarek Nejad:
For me, research is not simply an academic activity or a matter of collecting information.
It helps me understand the historical, cultural, or theoretical context of something I may have first encountered intuitively or emotionally.
But I don’t want research to turn the artwork into an illustration of a theory. That distinction is important to me.
Sometimes theory helps the work. At other times, the artwork raises a question for which theory does not yet have a clear answer.
That is where the relationship between art and research becomes interesting to me:
Art produces questions, and research follows those questions—but research does not necessarily have to close them.
Teaching as Rethinking
Interviewer: And what about teaching?
Moarek Nejad:
Teaching is different because I am no longer dealing only with my own work. I am encountering another person’s way of thinking.
When I teach something, I have to reorganize it, simplify it, examine it from different angles, and sometimes realize that I haven’t understood it as well as I thought I had.
So teaching is not simply the transmission of knowledge.
Teaching is itself a form of rethinking.
Sometimes a student’s question can shift something in my mind that I have been looking at in the same way for years.
Interviewer: Do these different roles ever conflict with one another?
Moarek Nejad:
Certainly.
The artist’s perspective may want to keep something ambiguous and open, while the researcher’s perspective wants to define it more precisely.
In teaching, meanwhile, I have to make something complicated understandable to someone else, whereas art does not always seek to make everything understandable.
These differences can sometimes be difficult, but that tension is also productive for me.
I don’t think every part of my work needs to be completely consistent with every other part.
Sometimes it is precisely the difference between them that creates the possibility for new thinking.
Continuing
Interviewer: If you had to define your artistic identity in one sentence, what would you say?
Moarek Nejad:
I don’t see myself as a collection of titles. I see myself as a continuous path of questions that have persisted through different media and forms.
Painting, video art, poetry, research, and teaching are not separate identities for me.
They are different possibilities for looking, experiencing, making, understanding, and communicating.
And perhaps, if I wanted to put it more personally:
I have not remained faithful to a single medium; I have remained faithful to questions that are not yet finished.
That sentence may describe several decades of my work better than any professional title could.
Interviewer: After all these years of working, perhaps the simplest question is: Why do you still continue?
Moarek Nejad:
Honestly, I don’t know if I can give a definitive answer.
If I could, perhaps part of the reason for continuing would disappear.
I think there are still things that remain unresolved for me—not because I am waiting for a final answer, but because I can still approach them from another angle.
Time has changed. I have changed. Society has changed. The media have changed. And even old questions no longer mean exactly what they once did.
So continuing is not simply a matter of repeating an old path. It is returning to old questions from a new position.
Interviewer: But isn’t there a danger that, after so many years, you will simply repeat yourself?
Moarek Nejad:
That is actually one of the things I worry about.
Sometimes an artist finds a language that has worked for them, and that language gradually becomes a habit.
The next work no longer comes from an inner necessity or a new question; it comes from the success of the previous work.
At that point, style can turn from a possibility into a limitation.
That is why I don’t think genuine continuation necessarily means producing more.
Sometimes continuing means stopping, abandoning a method, changing the medium, changing the angle of vision, or even accepting that something you have worked with for years is no longer enough for you.
Interviewer: So changing mediums is not a kind of escape from the past for you?
Moarek Nejad:
No—at least I hope it isn’t.
I feel that every medium has given me something, and at a certain point, each has also revealed its own limitations.
When I move from one medium to another, I carry part of my previous experience with me.
So, for me, the path has been less about changing subjects than about allowing questions to take new forms.
Interviewer: So what continues is the question itself?
Moarek Nejad:
Yes, but even that should not be stated too definitively.
The question itself changes over time.
At one point, I may think about loss and then realize that what really concerns me is not loss itself, but how we preserve the memory of something that has been lost.
That question may then lead me toward the city, history, images, archives, or even the question of survival.
So the question keeps moving, and in each period it takes on a different form.
Interviewer: So perhaps, after all these years, you are still searching for answers to the same old questions?
Moarek Nejad:
Perhaps, but I would qualify that slightly.
I don’t think my artistic work has been a long search for some lost answer.
If that were the case, I would eventually have to reach a point where I could say:
“I found it.”
I think art has been a way for me to open questions that do not necessarily have definitive answers.
Those are two very different things.
In the first case, art is a means of reaching something.
In the second, the journey itself becomes important.
Interviewer: And how far will this journey continue?
Moarek Nejad:
I don’t know.
And perhaps it is better that I don’t know.
If I knew the end of the journey in advance, I might turn it into another closed project.
For me, an open-ended conclusion does not mean having no direction.
On the contrary, it means accepting that human experience is always greater than what can be contained within a single artwork, a book, a theory, or even a lifetime.
Tomorrow, something may become important to me that I cannot see at all today.
And perhaps this is one of the few things I still want to preserve:
the possibility of being surprised.
Interviewer: And if, in the end, you had to say why you still continue, what would you say?
Moarek Nejad:
Because I still think there is something left to see, something left to ask, and something left to make.
Not because I expect that one day everything will become complete, but because incompleteness is itself part of the human experience.
And perhaps, ultimately, that is what art means to me:
continuing without claiming to have arrived;
seeing without claiming to see everything;
speaking with an awareness of the insufficiency of language;
and making something new precisely where we think there is nothing left to say.
So perhaps it is better not to end this conversation with a definitive answer either.
The question remains—and as long as there is a question, I will continue.
Interviewer: If one day you could no longer paint, make videos, write poetry, or conduct research, what would remain of the artist?
Moarek Nejad:
We usually define ourselves through the things we do: painter, video artist, poet. But if all these titles and activities were taken away from me, I think what would probably remain is a certain way of looking—a gaze that cannot completely accept the world exactly as it is presented.
There is always something in front of me that makes me ask:
Why is it this way? What is not being seen? What has been forgotten? What is changing? And what other possibility might exist?
In that sense, art is, before being something I do, a way of being present in the world. And that is where thinking begins for me.
I don’t see art simply as a means of expressing emotion or recording experience. For me, art is another way of thinking and of giving form to thought.
Sometimes I cannot express an idea in the form of an article or a theoretical argument, but I can approach it through an image, a video, a poem, a silence, or even through the relationship between several images.
So, for me, media are not simply different tools. Each medium offers a different possibility for thinking.
In painting, thought can take shape through composition, omission, color, space, and the relationships between elements.
In video, time, movement, repetition, silence, and sound become part of the structure of thought.
In poetry, language itself becomes the material of thought.
In research, experience enters the realm of concepts, history, and argument.
And in teaching, thought enters into a relationship with another person.
So if one day I could no longer do any of these things, perhaps something would still remain: the desire to see, to ask, to think, and to give thought a form that can be experienced.
Interviewer: So can we say that you are not first an artist and then someone who thinks; rather, it is thinking that leads you toward art?
Moarek Nejad:
I don’t think thinking and art are two completely separate stages—as though first there were “thought,” and then I turned it into “art.”
In many cases, the act of making itself is part of the process of thinking.
There may be something I still cannot explain in words, but once I begin making something, the work itself can help me understand what I am actually confronting.
That is why I sometimes don’t make a work in order to express an idea I already understand. It is through the process of making that part of the thought becomes visible even to me.
That distinction is important.
For me, art is not simply the transmission of a ready-made idea. Sometimes it is the place where thought itself takes shape.
Interviewer: Doesn’t this approach bring art too close to intellectual thinking? After all, art is also a sensory, emotional, and even physical experience.
Moarek Nejad:
When I say, “Art is an expression of thought for me,” I don’t mean that every artwork has to explain a theory or lead the audience toward a specific rational conclusion.
In fact, art moves beyond theory precisely when it transforms thought into experience.
An artwork may think about time, but turn time itself into an experience for the viewer.
It may not explain loss, but create an experience of loss through its own structure.
It may not speak directly about memory, but activate something in the viewer that makes them remember—or perhaps forget.
So, for me, art is not dry, theoretical thinking. It is thought transformed into form, experience, sensation, and encounter.
Perhaps I could put it this way:
Art is where thought takes form, and where form, in turn, produces thought.
Interviewer: Doesn’t this multiplicity in your art and in the media you work with sometimes make your artistic identity ambiguous?
Moarek Nejad:
Actually, I think we have to accept that possibility.
The art world usually likes to place people under specific titles: painter, video artist, poet, writer, or researcher.
These titles are useful for introducing and classifying people, but they never fully explain the reality of an artist.
If you see me only as a “painter,” part of my work disappears.
If you see me only as a “video artist,” another part of my journey remains unseen.
And if you see me only as a “writer” or “researcher,” the relationship between image, experience, and thought in my work disappears.
So perhaps my artistic identity has taken shape not through a single fixed title, but through the continuity of my questions and the different ways I have confronted them.
I don’t want one title to explain everything that I am.
Perhaps an artist’s identity, like the artwork itself, should remain open to some degree.
Interviewer: So is it possible that one day you might become tired of art?
Moarek Nejad:
Why not?
I think we should take that possibility seriously.
If I said, “I will never become tired,” perhaps I would be turning art into an obligation—or into a personal mythology.
I may become tired of producing work.
I may become tired of exhibitions, explaining my work, publishing, participating in the art world, or even of the image that society has constructed of the “artist.”
But that is different from becoming tired of thinking.
Sometimes continuing may not mean making a new artwork.
Sometimes continuing means remaining silent.
Sometimes it means putting the camera aside.
Sometimes it means not painting.
Sometimes it means not writing.
And perhaps, during that interval, something is taking shape that I don’t yet know how to name.
I don’t think an artist always has to be producing.
Sometimes the artist has to allow the world to give them something new to see.
Interviewer: So what exactly is art for you?
Moarek Nejad:
If I want to put it very simply:
Art, for me, is an expression of thought—but thought that does not merely want to be explained. It wants to be seen, heard, experienced, and felt.
That is why art, for me, is neither opposed to thought nor merely an image of thought.
Art itself is one of the ways of thinking.
And perhaps more importantly, art allows me to think through things that I still cannot fully put into words.
That is why I continue to make videos, write poetry, and conduct research.
Not because I have found a final answer, but because there are still questions that need to be given form.
And perhaps if one day I were able to define art completely, I should become a little concerned.
Because perhaps art begins precisely where we do not yet know something—where an experience, an image, a memory, or a question forces us to think again.
Maybe throughout all these years, rather than searching for a final answer, I have been trying to give form to my questions.
[Pause.]
And perhaps I am still here, in that very place.
Interviewer: Thank you very much for the time you have given me. It was a very useful conversation, and I appreciate your patience and generosity.