A city in a woman

The project I’m currently working on continues my journey of inner exploration and self-confrontation, this time focusing on my own body. My body becomes the land for my search, a land that, due to the religious culture in which I grew up, was very unknown and even remote. Now, my body becomes the most intimate and closest material for me. During this journey, sometimes the texture of the skin and the details of the forms I photograph lose their meaning and gradually transform into stones, seas, deserts, clouds, and so on. It is as if a female body forms the entirety of nature. This collection, progressing along its still unknown path, takes me along with it to its eventual conclusion. The next ideas for this project include creating a large-scale puzzle with details of my body, where the audience can move the pieces around, and designing and printing a one-piece garment with my body printed on it in several sizes, inviting the audience to wear it (essentially, to wear my skin). Seeing other people, whether men or women, in my skin might be considered a form of defamiliarization and taboo-breaking, and even a kind of universality that questions the significance and importance of differences between this skin, body shape, skin color, and other bodies in the world. Do the differences in these bodies’ details affect the overall spirit of the world, or are they merely visual diversity? If you had my body and I had yours, would it make a difference overall?