This series focuses on the abandoned cinemas of Tehran, built during the 1960s and 1970s in the bold Brutalist and modernist architectural language of the time. Once symbols of a new cultural life and a promised modernity, many of these buildings now stand abandoned and decaying, their present existing in stark contrast to the futures they once seemed to embody.

The paintings draw on J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise and The Drowned World, particularly his visions of architecture, isolation and environments gradually reclaimed by nature. Vegetation begins to overtake the cinema facades, blurring the boundary between the built and the natural, while the buildings themselves become fragments of a remembered or imagined city. The series considers the space between utopia and dystopia, and how places can carry the traces of futures that never quite arrived.

The series was selected for the UKNA Robert Walters Award in 2022, and exhibited at Saatchi Gallery, London.

Cinema Rivoli (2022), 160 × 130 cm, Oil on Canvas