Slap-eaters (2024)
Installation / Video / Soft Sculpture / XR Environment

Slap-eaters is a sensorial installation and XR-based video work that explores the politics of consumption, containment, and touch through soft sculptural forms and performative gestures. Rooted in diasporic memory and material repetition, the piece draws from domestic rituals and fragmented childhood recollections of eating, shame, and bodily discipline.

Viewers are invited to sit within soft sculptures cast from my own body—hand-sewn, padded forms suggestive of both protection and pressure—while wearing a VR headset. Inside the headset, they enter a motion-captured XR environment that extends the gestures of the physical installation into a speculative digital architecture. Simultaneously, a single-channel video is projected across the surrounding gallery walls, creating a layered encounter between screen, body, and space.

The slap, here, is both literal and symbolic: a gesture of interruption, a sensory jolt, a collapsed boundary between nurture and violence. Motion-responsive digital elements subtly respond to the viewer’s presence, blurring distinctions between the sculptural and virtual, the viewer’s body and mine.

Drawing from research on Iranian domestic space, gendered labor, and cultural rituals around food, Slap-eaters navigates the tension between softness and aggression, intimacy and distance. It resists clean resolution, instead offering a looping encounter with slow violence and care embedded in material and code. The work asserts the diasporic body within both virtual space and textile structure—tactile, mediated, and insistently present.

Slap-eaters was exhibited as part of Skyway 2024: A Contemporary Collaboration at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida.