moon city 2019

moon city is a three-channel video installation that weaves personal memory with collective unrest, set against the backdrop of Iran’s petrochemical industry. Two vertical, kaleidoscopic landscapes unfold in tandem, their mirrored forms evoking both industrial repetition and optical disorientation. Between them, a slow-moving text emerges on a red field—both a visual pulse and a narrative thread.
The work draws on oral stories shared by the artist’s father and uncle, who worked at the petrochemical facilities of Mah Shahr—translated as “Moon City”—a major port near the Persian Gulf. Their recollections are interlaced with accounts of the 2019 oil workers’ strike, a labor uprising that was met with state violence and censorship. By linking familial memory with political rupture, moon city traces how extraction economies shape not just land and labor, but the lives and legacies of those within them.
The text’s use of a shape-shifting first-person voice—alternating between human and land—disrupts fixed subjectivities and speaks to a shared condition of dispossession and endurance. This blurring complicates the boundaries between witness and site, offering a theoretical reflection on how voice can act as both presence and terrain, bearing the weight of history and defiance.
Through the interplay of moving image, text, and memory, the installation offers a fragmented portrait of a city suspended between industrial spectacle and lived experience. moon city asks how stories survive amid silenced histories—what remains in the wake of refusal, and what is passed on.