You’ve mentioned that your parents were persecuted for their secular beliefs. How did they approach talking to you about this?

Well, neither of my parents saw a therapist, for want of a better word. So I think I served that role in a way. But it was scary! My mom would tell me nighttime stories describing her prison cell. She would show me the burn marks on her skin from where they tortured her. It wasn’t until school that I realised not everyone had refugee, torture victims for parents. Until recently I had dual citizenship, but it’s been revoked on account of my work. One of the most unexpected things in your work is how glitchy it looks. Why did you choose this aesthetic?

People want to be visually seduced. If something is bright and has a contemporary aesthetic, I’m drawn to it, regardless of the content; and product photography and advertising functions in much the same way. I was thinking a lot about that attraction. Because the subject matter I deal with is not attractive. Even though, in our media-saturated world, things like torture have been normalised. So instead of reasserting and normalising that type of violence, I wanted to use the tools of seduction almost as a Trojan horse, to introduce new ways of engaging and thinking about these issues. You’re drawn initially to the colour and composition before realising that the image in fact deals with a torture victim. As for the pixellated element, that is actually a reference to the origins of the work. I receive a lot of images of women who have been erased, via the web and when I blow them up they naturally become pixellated. Rather than gloss over that, I thought it was interesting to consider how these images of women, who were meant to disappear, might permeate and be replicated online. How do you source your images – are they freely available online or do you have to draw on other sources?

I’d say 60-70% of my images are ones that I have dug deep on the internet to find, and others I have been able to source by talking to human rights lawyers inside of Iran and family members of these women via the Dark Web, because in Iran, the internet is heavily censored and controlled by the government. Which might come as a shock to anyone who knows me because I’m technologically quite illiterate. I wouldn’t have been able to do it if it weren’t my friend who knew how to set up a proxy. Do you fear any consequences from your work?

There are times when I’ve received threats from people. I think I’m maybe hyperconscious and sensitive when I shouldn’t be. But I worry because in the past, and particularly during the revolution when people who were opposed to the government escaped or were exiled and then followed and executed by members of the Basij – the neighbourhood militia. There’s a famous story about a homosexual musician called Fereydoun Farrokhzad who escaped to Germany and it is widely known that his murder was ordered by the Iranian government. So there is a bit of worry. Every time I get an email I question how easy it would be for someone to track down.