Third Space - Photography/Installation Project

In this series, I have collaborated with my parents who are temporary visitors to Canada on a second 30-day instalment. They have engaged in some rituals, using hybrid props and gestures drawn from both Iranian and Canadian contexts to perform daily acts of adaptation.

Despite their short stay, their visual attempts to “blend in” reflect a quiet desire to align with the host culture. These performances highlight the embodied labor of temporary belonging and the performativity of humour as a survival mechanism. In other words, they show how much effort goes into trying to belong, even for a short time; and how their wittiness/comic gestures can be a way to connect with others, even if it feels uncertain. Through these, they are pointing to both the desire to fit in and the difficulty of fully being understood across cultures.

As Erwin Wurm in his One Minute Sculptures believes “I approach the everyday as a site of absurd reconfiguration. These works expose how minor gestures (slightly “off,” unfamiliar, or misinterpreted) can generate critical humour rooted in displacement.” And to frame and reflect on this participatory process, I am drawing from postcolonial translation theory, auto-ethnographic reflection, and performance documentation as critical modes of knowledge production.