SHN: I don’t actively try to cultivate a specific avatar or persona on stage or in the rest of my work; it’s something that happens intuitively. In terms of imagery, it could be a bricolage not limited to: television detectives, Belle Epoque absinthe hallucinations, Persian “Tahrir” (yodeling) divas, Kavkaz dances, Flamenco fashions, Punk craftiness, the glamour of old Hollywood actresses, and the sacred eroticism of Baroque acapella choirs, but these are just some things that I enjoy! What excites me about costuming is the contrast between what I tend to wear on stage and the aggressiveness of the music. I think it’s important to mess with the codes that we have become accustomed to. I grew up in the noise and punk scenes, which were heavily male-coded and where the unofficial uniform was always a black hoodie. Underground scenes can be just as predictable as anything else. I really enjoy the mismatch of a glamorous image with an abrasive sound. It’s fun because it’s false advertising. The persona in this way becomes a push back against the clichés of what someone making experimental music or contemporary art should look like. For the drawings, I draw faces the same way I did as a child. My mom taught me how to draw these faces as a toddler, and I continue the same general method. There is also a dialogue here with Iranian painting, miniature traditions; the faces of the Safavid Era look somewhat similar. When I draw or compose music, the process is always improvisation, so the content is never pre-planned. I have always been anti-rehearsal and anti-sketching in that way, so everything becomes a final product. Sometimes I don’t love it, but I have decided to live with it.

SHN: I often think about this Catherine Breillat quote, where she says, “I am the film. I don’t make the film.” I agree with her. I think that’s why there is a continuity between the drawings and the performances, a certain stylized self-representation. But the self itself also becomes a vehicle to express something else. I, too, in the context of a performance, become a kind of material. I have a lot of respect for film for this reason: it is a synthesis of sound, literature, light, image, and sets. I see my work as a kind of deconstructed cinema, where all of those elements are at play, just not at the same time. My exhibition at Luma was about this: how to make the performative/sound aspects come alive next to objects and paintings. The idea began with my effort to illustrate the romantic lives of musical notes. I wanted to make a musical score that included objects and physical works that were musical in their own way.

SHN: I definitely have a maximalist instinct, and for me it’s connected to musicality. My show at Karma International was entitled Vanity: Ornamental Madness in the Shadow of a Dionysian Mask, and it came from Nietzsche’s distinction in The Birth of Tragedy, where Apollo is aligned with sculpture, form, clarity, and Dionysus with music, madness, and a destabilized self. But Nietzsche, like many other philosophers, also associated the Dionysian with a feminine temperament, and also geographically with the East. So, there is this very problematic distinction of the Western world as logical and the East as unpredictable/unknowable. Adornment is often coded as feminine, and I’m interested in that too, both in embracing it and complicating it. I wanted to push that to its own excess to create a sort of decorative madness that loses its docility and becomes frightening. I was also thinking about Adolf Loos’s Ornament and Crime, and this push towards eliminating superfluous objects and a turn towards useful minimal interiors, which, for me, feels very rigid. In the exhibition, the broken mirror fragments reflect the viewer to themselves, but not in a Narcissus-like way. Instead, the mirror becomes a space of mimicry and projection. By inserting the viewer into the work, it multiplies the self. The mirror turns into a stage. I have always liked Florine Stettheimer’s party-scene paintings because of their storytelling and the fact that they decentralize the gaze. The paintings become passive, and the gaze of the viewer, active. In Discours/Figure, Lyotard says that “seeing is a dance” and that “a painting is not something to be read… it has to be grazed.” I find that crowded scenes lend themselves to this kind of witnessing, where each person can choose where to begin and end the story. I’m also very drawn to painters whose work feels musical, not because they depict musicians or are made by musicians, but because of the methodology itself, the repetition and gesture, brushstrokes that carry tempo. I guess the most obvious example would be Chagall.

SHN: That exhibition was influenced more directly by poetry than by cinema, particularly images and impressions from Le Spleen de Paris by Charles Baudelaire. It was also inspired by the Chartreuse monks, who produce Chartreuse, the liqueur from which the color takes its name. They say they went on strike in order to devote themselves to a different kind of spirit. Some people say their publicist encouraged the decision, since reduced production has made the prices go way up! For Baudelaire, drunkenness was sacred, much as it is within Sufi traditions. I think my approach to the theme could be seen as cinematic in terms of the exhibition’s mise-en-scène. From the installed green carpet, the light, and the viridian velvet backdrops for the drawings, I was focused on creating a cohesive environment. The works themselves were chromatically filtered, bringing to mind the stained glass of churches.

SHN: I am currently working on a new album where I will incorporate a more traditional form of songwriting. It’s been a few years since my last release, so I’m excited to see how this one will be different from the previous albums. I’m also working on a short film treatment with a filmmaker friend of mine. In terms of paintings, I’m thinking about something gestural and textured, and experimenting with durational, performative painting. Something in sync with the strokes of a violin.