Have You Heard Anything?

2020–2021

…”And the times were singing out in an eloquent tongue, but non hearkened.”

Bayhaqi’s History

This series began in silence.

It was the second anniversary of my living in Isfahan and also the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. I found myself standing in the center of Naqsh-e Jahan Square—a place usually filled with tourists, carriages, people, movement, and sound. But suddenly, it was completely still. Empty. The entire world had fallen into a strange pause. And in that quiet, I began to imagine: a massive whale, stranded. Not on a beach, but here—inland, in a place with no sea.

In Have You Heard Anything?, I created a series of large-format digital drawings, printed on illuminated lightboxes. Using a digital pen, I placed these enormous whales into familiar public spaces: the dry riverbeds of Isfahan, the courtyards of mosques, the gates of universities, the facade of Tehran’s city theater. These locations are not accidental—they are heavy with historical, architectural, and emotional memory.

Far from any ocean, the beached whales become a metaphor: for isolation, for collective grief, for the quiet extinction of meaning. Their weight—majestic and tragic—echoes the slow collapse of values, the erasure of communities, and the suffocating pressure of social and political history. They are too large to ignore, yet too still to resist.

The lightboxes give the drawings a luminous, spectral presence, amplifying the dissonance between beauty and despair. The works were first exhibited in Isfahan and later shown in several European institutions. But the question remains, suspended in the silence:
Have you heard anything?