These videos were presented at the Monoxide Project Exhibition in 2012 to address environmental pollution. The exhibitors were all parents, so naturally, they were worried about the adverse effects of pollutants on their children. She was especially worried about the air pollution problem in her city, Tehran.

Project Implementation

As this work was designed to be interactive, she planned it as follows:

Two looping ten-second-long videos were projected onto two opposite walls. The first video portrayed some rather thick smoke, symbolizing air pollution, gradually rising from a toilet seat, while in the second video, a little girl was playing with a dandelion globe while running behind some white cotton sheets hanging on a rope.

A start button was placed conveniently in the middle of the showroom. These two short videos would play repeatedly until someone from the audience pressed the start button, in which case the smoke in the first movie would diminish suddenly as if the toilet was flushed and the little girl would walk forward past the cotton sheets and blow the seeds off some already-plucked feathery heads of dandelion globes, which she had been holding in her hands all along, expressing her discontent in a symbolic gesture.

Observation

She was taken aback by the teenagers’ reactions, especially as they were the only ones who figured out what the start button was for and what she intended to express all along. It was so rewarding to watch them encourage their parents to pay closer attention to her work. The show was presented at Manzoumeh Kherad Institute, located in one of Tehran’s northern neighborhoods.