What remains

Abstract

This thesis explores the relationship between body, memory, violence, and archival imagery through a practice-based artistic methodology grounded in the lived experiences of Iranian women. Drawing from informal and digital archives, including social media images, protest documentation, personal photographs, and circulated visual material, the project examines how images shaped by censorship, instability, and fragmentation can be transformed through material and spatial processes. Instead of treating images as fixed representations, the project approaches them as unstable materials that undergo physical transformation through cyanotype, image transfer, scanning, layering, ceramic processes, and installation. These methods introduce interruption, loss, distortion, and material variation, shifting the image from circulation into tactile and embodied form. A central concern of the research is the ethics of representing violence. Instead of reproducing graphic imagery directly, the project explores alternative strategies of visibility through fragmentation, radiographic imagery, partial transfer, and material mediation. In this way, the work attempts to resist the spectacle of violence while maintaining traces of bodily vulnerability and lived experience. The resulting installation functions as a spatial and material archive in which transparency, layering, suspension, and viewer movement shape how images are encountered. Through these processes, the thesis argues that artistic practice can operate as a form of embodied research, where knowledge emerges through physical engagement with images, materials, and space.