The Unseen,
a systemic violence without spectacle.
This photographic series was developed during a recent three-month artist residency in Iran. While documenting daily street scenes, slowly a recurring absence became apparent. Shopping malls were without mothers with babies, pavements without strollers, and public squares without running children: youth in general, was largely missing from public life. This absence reflects the long-term effects of sanctions, bringing with it an economic uncertainty and persistent inflation since 1979, making marriage and parenthood increasingly an unaffordable luxury.
While international news media extensively documents the economic and political effects of sanctions, focusing heavily on inflation, currency shifts, and geopolitical tensions, the long-term, exponential disappearance of children from Iran’s daily life is a subject almost entirely confined to scientific papers and demographic statistics. Though absence is difficult to document and produces no discrete event, only the quiet erosion of a society's future, this project seeks to bridge that gap, addressing a phenomenon that is nearly impossible to visualise photographically, yet alarmingly perceptible in Iranian everyday life.
In front of the Imamzadeh Saleh Mosque in Tehran, beside the bustling Tajrish Bazaar, I encountered a statue depicting a boy and a girl, entirely in white, an image of innocence celebrating childhood. This monument inspired a conceptual turning point: absence could not be photographed directly, but it could be made visible. To visualise the unseen, the children in my photographs are erased by hand with Tippex, the correction fluid traditionally used to conceal mistakes in writing. This gesture of deleting an entry enlarged to the size of a person, is the deliberate post-production intervention applied consistently throughout the series: each Tippex mark is a manual, effortful act of erasure, mirroring the systemic forces that render these children invisible, not just absent, but actively written out of Iran’s present and future.
The series documents a quiet crisis without spectacle, yet one that is unmistakably perceptible in daily life: homes with only adults, streets without buggies, a society lacking children’s laughter. Visualising absence as a form of violence and using Tippex to erase children from the image, I aim to bring attention to the profound, long-term inhuman consequences of political repression and US-led sanctions. The series does more than document what is missing, it enacts the erasure itself, forcing the viewer to confront not just the absence of children, but the systematic forces rendering them invisible, where each island of silence is connected by a sea of systemic repression. This raises a profound and urgent question: how can a society, drained of its future by decades of sanctions and economic hardship, muster the collective energy to rise up and demand change?