On each photograph, Rezaei has stitched a triangle. The shape’s significance is threefold: it is a prominent motif in Hazara embroidery; it symbolises the mountains which dominate the landscape; and it is a sign of warning. By framing sections of the photographs within the triangle, the artist draws our focus to unexpected areas of each scene, thus critiquing the archive as a form of classification. Through this re-focusing of our attention, Rezaei draws attention to photography as a mechanism of seeing, one which projects and obliterates certain perspectives, peoples and histories as much as it exposes them. 

FATEMEH REZAEI is an Afghan Hazara artist and researcher based in the United States. Her interdisciplinary practice combines photography, archival images, and installation to explore displacement, memory, and the uneven visibility of Hazara histories and Afghan women’s lives across Afghanistan, Iran, and the diaspora. Moving between personal and political registers, her work attends to what remains fragile, obscured, or only partially visible. She uses the image as a space where history, intimacy, and rupture meet, opening possibilities for care, remembrance, and alternative forms of witnessing.

ISABEL WALTER is a writer and curator based in Amsterdam. She currently works as Assistant Curator at Foam, and Editorial Assistant at Foam Magazine. She is particularly interested in art which expands the technical and conceptual boundaries of photography, moving image and new technologies.