The product

31″x31″
Mixed-media installation and performance.

In this installation/performance, I sit inside a 31-inch clear shipping box that is wrapped in stretch film, stamped security checked, covered with postal codes from my home in Tehran to my university in Toronto. On the label, the product name is The Student. Ink pools at my feet. Dressed in white, I handwrite my own poetry in Farsi across the film, telling the stories I carry from home with me from grief and resistance.

This is the space I’ve been given as an international student: permitted, visible, limited. I have been trying to use the “universal” language of art to translate what is happening in my country, but the translation is never whole. The calligraphy is legible to some, unreadable to many; meaning leaks between languages and borders.

Packaged like cargo, the work arrives as something “authentic” to look at, its labels and foreign script promising access while keeping the message contained. Viewers can circle the box, admire it, and move on.

The poems remain sealed inside: witnessed, archived, and largely untouched. Many of the words will be gone by the time there is a second visit, if there is any. The piece records an impossible translation, a body in transit, a testimony that keeps arriving yet is never fully received. I write for as long as I can.

This small, permitted space reflects my attempt as an international student to translate my country’s pain into the “universal” language of art with this given limited space and privilege to speak, yet the translation is never whole, the meaning leaking between languages, the work admired as authentic but remaining sealed, a testimony in transit that never fully arrives.