Rooms, Roles and Resistance
A bed’s edge becomes a route into imagined lives; a bedroom mirror becomes a place to rehearse another identity; a bathroom becomes a site where the body is brought into line with expectations of femininity. In Nazanin Ghahramani’s Impossible Woman, Impossible Space, Impossible Time, familiar surroundings acquire significance through the actions performed within them. Combining observational drawing, autobiographical writing and architectural reconstruction, Ghahramani examines how gender is learned through everyday encounters, and how those same encounters can make room for resistance.
Ghahramani’s website places this investigation alongside Looking in the Mirror and Duet. Her self-portraits explore the changing relationship between appearance and identity, while Duet studies her parents within their immediate domestic surroundings. Together, these projects establish a continuing interest in how people understand themselves through bodies, family relationships and inhabited space. Impossible Woman, Impossible Space, Impossible Time extends this enquiry by connecting intimate experience with the politics of occupying the city.
Developed through seven spatial fragments, the project draws on memories of childhood and family life in Kerman and Tehran. Its central figure, the “impossible woman”, carries a productive contradiction: she is both the ideal woman whose prescribed qualities cannot be fully attained and the rebellious woman who challenges those prescriptions. Ghahramani’s engagement with gender performativity takes shape through specific experiences of dressing, washing, playing and looking at herself. These give the project an intimacy that sustains its theoretical concerns.
The hand-drawn images are particularly effective in establishing this connection. Fine, accumulated marks describe furniture, fabric, skin and hair, while shifts in tonal density bring certain figures and objects forward. Rooms remain recognisable without becoming exhaustively resolved. Their partially drawn surroundings suggest the unevenness of recollection, where a mirror or a piece of clothing can remain vivid while the space around it recedes. This selective attention allows domestic objects to carry psychological weight.
In Hair Dilemma, straightening becomes an early lesson in the relationship between appearance and acceptance. The child’s desire for straight hair is entangled with her admiration for particular images of womanhood and her uncertain identification with her mother. The mirror promises recognition but also makes discrepancy visible. Ghahramani avoids presenting identity as something already complete beneath an imposed appearance. Instead, the episode reveals how a sense of self develops through comparison, aspiration and discomfort. Her perception of her mother’s body complicates this further: both mother and daughter are described as having to accommodate aspects of their appearance, revealing how bodily difference becomes entangled with expectations of femininity and personal worth.
In Performing the Woman, wearing her mother’s colourful blouse and high heels allows the child to temporarily inhabit an alternative version of herself. The drawing’s arrangement of figure, dressing table and clothing gives this transformation a tangible setting. The bedroom offers a provisional freedom, although the identity rehearsed there still draws on familiar feminine codes. This ambiguity strengthens the work: pleasure in dressing up can coexist with an awareness of the conventions that make the transformation legible.
The mirror also introduces a formal division between the body and its image. The child can look at herself as though she were someone else, testing the distance between an inward sense of identity and an outward appearance. Within the project’s largely monochrome visual language, the accompanying account of colour and patterned clothing supplies a sensory intensity that the drawing leaves the viewer to imagine.
In the Living Room, places this private transformation alongside the familiar routines of family life. In the accompanying narrative, the child hears the news, an advertisement and an argument on screen while experimenting with another identity in the adjoining bedroom. Returning to the living room, she becomes “Nazanin again”, and no one notices what has taken place. The contrast between the two spaces gives the episode its emotional force: an experience that feels thrilling and significant to the child passes unregistered by those around her.
In Walking the Edge of the Bed, bodily movement opens a more expansive imaginative territory. Balancing along the bed’s edge allows the child to become a police officer, writer or fisherman. The corresponding memory of walking along a street kerb connects an intimate interior with the city outside. Both edges become supports for invention. A piece of furniture and an element of street infrastructure acquire a shared function through the child’s use of them.
Walking the Edge of the Bed in the City develops that connection. Reconstructed street elements and drawn trees meet within a composition that disrupts conventional scale and continuity. Elsewhere in the project, rooms appear cut open, suspended or connected across gaps. These arrangements give remembered actions a spatial presence without pretending that memory can be recovered as a complete, stable environment. The relationship between the bed and the street emerges through movement and imagination, rather than through their physical resemblance.
In Shower with Grandma, the drawing of the grandmother washing the child gives physical form to the relationship between care and gendered expectation. The accompanying narrative describes vigorous scrubbing that leaves the child gleaming “like a girl”, contrasting this with her enjoyment of football, dirt and scraped knees. These experiences reveal competing expectations of the body: the child values the marks of active play, while washing restores a socially approved appearance. Care and regulation become difficult to separate, showing how ideas about femininity pass through ordinary family routines.
The drawing of the washing scene makes that tension bodily. The adult bends over the child, and the confined setting concentrates attention on the act of handling and cleaning. The child’s body becomes the meeting point between the grandmother’s care and an insistence on a particular standard of presentation.
In the architectural collage Gleaming like a Girl, the bathroom and elements associated with play are drawn into a single, discontinuous construction. Their proximity makes visible the competing demands placed on the same body: to move freely and to return in an acceptable condition. Objects associated with washing and football become markers of these different expectations, connecting the organisation of space with the regulation of behaviour.
Across the project, the architectural drawings introduce a deliberate tension. Plans, sections and three-dimensional models suggest measurable space, yet the memories they reconstruct resist complete measurement. Ghahramani’s most persuasive compositions retain that mismatch, allowing technical structure and drawn recollection to remain visibly distinct. The combination gives physical settings both an architectural organisation and an emotional instability.
Some passages depend on the accompanying writing to communicate their full psychological complexity. The images alone cannot convey every shift in the narrator’s relationship with her mother or every association attached to an object. However, the interplay between text and image is central to the investigation: the writing articulates uncertainty and remembered sensation, while the drawings examine how those experiences occupy space.
The final fragment, Impossible Woman and Her Objects, brings personal identity into direct confrontation with the city. Carrying objects from her home into the street, the narrator insists on their presence despite the anger of drivers and pedestrians. Each object becomes both a sign of who she is and an exposure of something painful, described as “a wound that must be opened”. Claiming space therefore involves vulnerability as well as defiance. In the distance, another woman performs the same act. Her resemblance to the narrator and her mother connects this individual assertion with an emerging sense of shared experience. The “impossible woman” becomes recognisable through her actions: she places her life in public view and claims the right to remain there.
What distinguishes Ghahramani’s work is the way she reconstructs space around remembered bodily actions. A bed’s edge, a mirror, a pair of shoes or a washing routine becomes a means of examining how identity is formed and negotiated. Her combination of hand drawing and architectural modelling gives these experiences two complementary forms: the drawn mark preserves their intimacy, while the reconstructed space exposes relationships between bodies, objects and boundaries. The project is most convincing where those forms remain in tension, making the uncertainty of memory part of its visual structure. Through this approach, Ghahramani turns specific family experiences into a considered examination of who is permitted to appear, move and take up space.
View more of Nazanin Ghahramani’s work at www.nazaninghahramani.com.
Review written by Lisa Gray 13/10/2026
