Bahram Beyzai’s Mirrors

This video work extracts and reweaves mirror scenes from five films by Bahram Beyzai—Bashu, the Little Stranger, Maybe Some Other Time, Travellers, Killing Mad Dogs, and When We Are All Asleep—layering them with my own narration to create a meditation on reflection, recognition, and the archaeology of self.

In Persian mythology, the mirror holds a paradox: it reveals both truth and illusion, serving as a portal to wisdom while also exposing vanity and darkness. Rumi asked us to wipe the dust from our inner mirrors; Beyzai’s characters gaze into glass surfaces searching for identities fractured by history, displacement, and erasure. His women—deterritorialized, haunted by fragmented memories—must look backward to understand who they are.

By isolating these mirror moments and placing them in conversation with one another, I construct a new vessel for these reflections. My voice enters as another layer: the artist as witness, gathering scattered shards and holding them up to light.

What do we see when we look at ourselves looking? When does the mirror reveal, and when does it withhold? In a culture where women’s images and histories have been systematically controlled, the act of reclaiming the gaze—of choosing which reflections to preserve—becomes both personal archaeology and collective remembrance.