Nazanin Hafez’s practice is rooted in her personal experience of political oppression under the Iranian regime. Hafez consistently returns to a central tension: the relationship and dynamics between the image and the power structures that produce it. A key body of work is her collage series 𝘚𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘴, for which Hafez intervenes in the websites of Iranian and international press agencies. She draws attention to the way that state violence is not only enacted but requires orchestration and execution on a systematic scale. ⁠

Raisan Hameed’s work moves between the personal and the collective, using his own biography as an entry point into larger questions about war, memory, and what images can and cannot preserve. Working with family archives, found photographs, digital tools like Google Maps, Hameed is consistently drawn to the places where images are damaged, pixelated, or incomplete. Rather than treating these as problems, he makes them the subject. ⁠⁠

Both Hafez and Hameed are making work from within ongoing realities, from the inside of experiences that havenot concluded, and both have developed practices that push back against the conditions thoserealities impose. Where Hafez turns outward, intercepting the public circulation of images of stateviolence, Hameed turns inward, excavating the private archive and the personal wound. Re-Traceis a still moment to re-think images — the power of what they show and the necessity of whatthey suppress, and what it means to refuse the terms on which they were made.