Remembrance: Attachment: Mahboobeh, Then

Mahboobeh, Then Acrylic on silk, 40 × 20 cm, 2023

Part of my Remembrance: Love and Grief series.

This painting is based on a photograph I took of my sister, Mahboobeh, when we were teenagers, standing in one of the rooms of our old family home. At that time, the house was an ordinary part of our shared life, a familiar space that held our everyday presence together.

Rendered in yellow, blue, and red, her figure appears through a mirrored composition, where the image is reflected and transformed across the silk. The doubling recalls the way memory revisits familiar places and people, never returning in exactly the same form.

Looking at this image today, I see not only my sister as she was, but a version of our relationship that belongs to a time before distance changed our lives. The old room becomes a container for that lost closeness—a place where Mahboobeh remains suspended between the person I remember and the person she has become.

Through painting, I return to this fragment of our shared past, allowing the photograph to become something more than a record: a space where attachment, distance, and memory continue to meet.