Leila Moosavi, Iranian Equation

"Iranian Equation" is a performance installation responding to the ongoing events in Iran since early January, when nationwide protests against the regime were met with extreme violence. On the nights of January 8th and 9th alone, it is estimated that between 30,000 and 40,000 people were killed. The true number remains unknown, as authorities continue to pressure families into reporting these deaths as accidents or natural causes.

Since then, violence has not stopped. Today, innocent civilians continue to lose their lives in a war they did not choose to be part of.

This work challenges the reduction of human lives into statistics. Numbers can be counted, repeated, and eventually forgotten. But each number represents a person, someone with a name, a face, a story, and a future that was taken away.

"Iranian Equation" attempts to break this abstraction. It asks: how do we measure loss when the scale becomes unimaginable? And what happens when thousands of individual lives are compressed into a single figure?

Through performance and installation, the project resists the logic of numbers and instead restores presence to those who have been erased. It is an act of remembrance, but also of resistance, against silence, against distortion, and against the normalization of mass death.

Audience members are invited to participate in the ongoing documentation of each individual, contributing to a collective act of witnessing and remembrance. In doing so, the work shifts from passive observation to shared responsibility.

Leila Moosavi is an Iranian artist and PhD candidate in Fine Arts based in Wrocław, Poland. Her practice focuses on the mechanisms of manipulation, propaganda, and collective behavior, using installation and interdisciplinary media to explore how power shapes perception. Her current research investigates how art can function as a tool to reveal and simulate techniques of brainwashing, with a focus on political and social contexts.