My family emigrated from Iran when I was three years old. This made me young enough to easily assimilate into American culture. But even though the bulk of my cultural connections are American, I know there is Iranian culture inside me — culture that is usually easy to ignore while walking through an American life.

With Rebuilding Babel I have friends and acquaintances engage with artifacts of my familial culture. These objects, which are mostly meaningless to them, render the portraits inaccurate to who they are. Instead, these are images of some kind of relationship between my American and Iranian selves.