ADMA 2025-2026

In search of (Hiding the) Ghosts

is a multidirectional research project that traces the role of opacity and fluidity to summoning those histories and perspectives that are flattened and overshadowed by the dominant regimes of visibility. Through expanded painting and writing I try to bridge between material and theoretical research, and find ways to interconnect them.

I usually pick and pluck fragments from the past and different theoretical frameworks, transforming them to something else, and letting them transform me in return. The process usually deals with constant disorientation/ reorientations.

Most of my work in the past three years has been about bringing to present, the practices of painting which existed during the Safavid era Iran (1501-1736) along with their socio-economic and sexual context. 

The research actually started a year before by studying a 17th century self portrait/petition painted by the Safavid era painter Muhammad Qasim. By that time I wrote an imaginary interview with the ghost of the artist titled ‘The Price of a Thirst Trap’. This was somehow a formative research on the possible ways to re-embody that painting.

By invoking the ghostly presence of this migrant painter, and his struggle to attract a patron, I tried to parallel Qasim’s work to our current day race of motivation letters and the labour of speculation embedded in it. As Muhammad Qasim, with this painting tries to perform an identity which is aiming to seduce his potential patron(1), I was reflective of the erotic labour of seduction within this future-oriented speculation, I looked at the relationship drawn between desire, value and simulacrum, as worked by Pierre Klossowski in his seminal work Living Currency. Funnily, I got rejected by three residencies which I applied to with this project. 

I started the AdMa programme asking how can the figure of the ghost make (in)visible those histories, and knowledge which are often overshadowed or flattened by dominant/majoritarian ones? Moreover I was also curious to know more about the spectral presence of finance in relation to arts. What I learnt from the ghosts was that in method, they always stay in-between. Between living and the dead, pasts and futures, presences and absences, the no longer and the not yet. Famously quoted, for ghosts time is simply out of joint. 

Hauntology is the proper temporal mode for a history made up of gaps, erased names and sudden abductions.(2) Perhaps a reason why I am drawn to the Safavid era Iran, is because as a diasporic Armenian, I believe a juncture happened in the temporality of the Armenian lives who had to enter the Iranian domain by force during the early years of 17th century. These bodies were forced to become political eunuchs and stem new diasporic relations from here that extended throughout the globe by the late 18th century.(3)

I approach this historical materials not as a way to find absolute truth about my origins, but as a way to explore the possibilities of those gaps, and unknowns.

Detail from Muhammad Qasim, Youth Holding a Letter, 1635.

Opaque watercolor on paper (33.5 cm × 11.5 cm). Gulistan Palace World Heritage

Tash’eers

I started painting again. Not knowing where to start, I was collecting materials that I find appealing, or potentially translatable to new paintings. Accidentally I started looking in detail at the marginalia of another Safavid painting project. The Tash’eers are decorative drawings, usually appearing on the margins of manuscripts, and single folio drawings, and calligraphies. They usually consist of motifs drawn in one or two colours, usually depicting natural elements, such as flora and fauna, and mythical creatures such as simurgh and dragon. 

Along with re-studying The Munsell color system, I started re-painting these paratextual elements exactly where they should be, on the margins of paintings.(4) While the center holds the image of a transient skyscape, the margins become the field of possibilities. This is where most of the painterly action happens. Margin is reimagined as a site of possibility for passion and desires, and imagination. I did not intend to capture the marginal narratives (in this case the decorative), but thinking through the “the unstable, fugitive image which resists capture and is constantly in process of transformation. 

In this series, my goal was to give them a new body, without aiming for a “representation” of these forms. Gesturing a flow of force that avoids mimetic representation and capture. In an age of rapid visibility, and short attention span, I wanted to look closer to what was overlooked by both Western, and Iranian art histories, and expand their narrative capabilities through extensive layering, hiding, and play of colors. 

How can opacity and fluidity become methodologies for bringing to present those histories, narratives or modes of knowledge which are often flattened or overshadowed by dominant regimes of visibility?

How can the margins become sites of possibility without becoming a rigid site of its own?

Nothing was fixed, only liquids rushing in to fill space. While the bordered center held the always-transient impression of the sky above, the margins were constructed through layers of washes, uncertain gestures, drips, and wet drawings which would slide down and be transformed by the forces of gravity and oxidation. The meaning of liquids is to move, and in this case, to also hide.   While painting the 5th Tash’eer, I noticed that my own uncertainty, and contingent situation makes me unable to capture them fully. This period coincided with two time-shattering experiences I went through simultaneously, the January 2026 massacre, and the following US-Israeli imperial aggression against my home-country, and at the same time experiencing becoming undocumented in Belgium due to the immigration office’s refusal of my case for renewal. I became ghosted. 

During these harsh times, the margins became my only remaining playful site, a space that was constantly shapeshifting, fluid and immeasurable. It was this constant negotiation with fluidity and uncertainty that led me back to the other direction of my research.

Detail from ‘Tash’eer No.7 (These slaves of love), Acrylic, Ink and Oil on Canvas, 100x80, 2026

The Price of a Thirst Trap (Diorama and Motivation Letters fro MQ)

Extending the same question of how to trace Fluidity and opacity in relation to bringing to the present the overshadowed and marginal perspectives in history, I came back to my research from last year. 

I take this research as a way to reflect on the current uncertainties and contingent modes of working in the arts in the era of financialization, austerity measures, and strict immigration policies in the west. This particularly becomes even more contingent for those of us, who have moved to the west and have to face constant dehumanization by the evermore restricting immigration policies, and our time and potential being stolen from us.

Moreover I see this research more focused on the epitext of the arts: What surrounds the art. 

How can we make the context the content of the work?

I took the research from last year further. Muhammad Qasim’s historical professional seduction is juxtaposed with the often conflicting contemporary race of motivation letters and grant applications within Western art infrastructures. Getting more acquainted with the work of art theorician Marina Vishmidt, I came to realize that the infrastructures of art does not necessarily mean the institutions, and their technologies of displays. But infrastructure as those which persist. They make possible, insofar as they make impossible. This could be could be infrastructures of psychic extraction, individualisation of responsibility, or blame, racism, inability to sufficiently leverage or mobilise your own human and social capital. The institutions of art, have the tendency to tokenize certain bodies for their own benefit. This is where the lingering legacies of Orientalism still persist in the institutional sphere. 

As I noticed that the conditions of visibility are not the same for everyone in the field, I tried to be critical of our current conditions of visibility, faced by other and orientalized bodies within the Western infrastructures of art. While writing the motivation letters, one has to constantly negotiate their identity and belief systems in order to fit. Some institutions like you when you’re just a painter, some like you when you’re the ultimate traumatized victim of oppression, while others like you for your goofiness.

I decided to remake Muhammad Qasim’s self portrait in one of the most repeated technologies of display in the Western museums; The diorama. Through using certain taxonomies and modes of display, the museum “disciplined” the bodies of objects through practices of spatial ordering, and at the defined pathways and routes to deliver certain narratives about those objects. The absence of the figure from the diorama is a reflection on this conditional presence.

In my work however, the diorama is subverted to emphasize on the opacity of the object it displays. Here, the body of the artist becomes a spectral presence that cannot be easily tokenized.

The disembodied figure, however, had to hold a motivation letter. I casted my partner’s hands with wax, another fascinating fluid material, and placed a page of found poems titled “Motivation letters” in their hand. These poems, which were harvested from many of my research sources, speak the language of finance, of ghosts, of orientalist travelers who were obsessing over the sex in the orient, and  of the literature around problematizing the diasporic condition. Inspired by Franco Berardi’s wish to emancipate the language from the financial automated language, my aim was to simply demotivate the motivation letter, and to evade simplistic flattenings of identities and potentials.

The Price of a Thirst Trap, Ply wood, MDF, Oil paint, Wax, Silk Thread, Yupo paper, and aluminum, 65 x 53x 35 cm, 2026

Footnotes:

1- He depicted himself as a representation of a young male beauty with a letter in hand. This beardless youth is somehow an image of the ultimate homoerotic object of desire of the time. See Babayan, K. (2021). The city as anthology: Eroticism and urbanity in early modern Isfahan. Stanford University Press. (91-102).

2- Fisher, M, The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology, Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 5(2), 42–55.

3- Sebuh Aslanian correlates the position of Julfan Armenians  as ideal servants of power to embodying many of the traits that the sociologist Lewis Coser defines as “political eunuchism” (Aslanian,2011, 42), not in the sense of being physically castrated, but in the sense of being trusted by the Shah without any significant fear. Aslanian, S. D. (2011). From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa. University of California Press, Ltd. (41-42).

4- Literary theorist Gerard Genette analyses, paratextual elements as those which enable and ensure a text presence in the world, it's reception and consumption by the readers. Paratext = Peritext (The elements within text like preface, illuminations etc.) + Epitext (the informations about the main body of text circulating outside the book, which could be included in the book, like interviews, reviews etc.).