Bahram Rameh

Stop consuming for a moment. Just for a few minutes, pay attention to the world around you.
I am not saying this from a place of awareness, knowledge, or moral authority. I am speaking from a condition I find myself in from a place where you begin to see how humanity is slowly pushed to the margins, how human suffering turns into news, statistics, content, and then into silence.
We, as Iranians, have repeatedly tried to be the voice of the world. For Gaza. For Lebanon. For Afghanistan. For Ukraine. For Sudan. For women and children living under war, oppression, poverty, discrimination, and injustice. We have raised our voices, shared, written, protested, and insisted that human suffering has no borders and no nationality.
But today, Iran stands in one of its darkest moments. Executions continue. Lives are extinguished quietly. Families are left in fear and without shelter. And at the same time, the internet which should be a bridge between people and the world has become a class privilege. Some remain connected, some are erased, some are seen, and many are never even given the chance to be heard.
When access is unequal, it is not only connection that disappears. Truth, narrative, and visibility are also controlled.
This is not only a question of one country. It is a question of humanity and if we remain indifferent, it will repeat itself anywhere.
On World Graphics Day, for me, design is not simply the production of images. It is standing against silence.
Please ,be the voice of Iran.

Surplus | مازاد
Self-Portrait | سلف‌پرتره

In Iran, the internet is not merely cut it is stratified; access is a privilege. Executions continue daily, administrative, unannounced. In Afghanistan, girls are barred from education and the world has grown accustomed. In Gaza, children remain under rubble as the count goes on. In Sudan, famine advances while summits are held. In Myanmar, people are erased from the map and reports are filed away.
Normalization is the final form of erasure the moment when catastrophe is no longer concealed, only passed through. Politics, security, economics, energy, technology, ideology, and state interests dominate every conversation. The global left and right each translate suffering into their own language; one through resistance, the other through security and order. Human rights organizations document, report, and warn yet the gap between recording pain and changing reality only widens.
The human being itself is no longer the center, nor even the measure. We have moved from subject to variable, and from variable to surplus.
This image knows it too is part of the same spectacle; it will be seen, consumed, and scrolled past.
In 2019, a banana was taped to a wall. That work was about the valuation of art.
This one is about something simpler: life.
This is not a paradox. This is the mechanism.
Bahram Rameh
Toronto, April 2026

They say take your medication, go to therapy, become "functional" again. But this pain is not an illness it is the only waking part that has not bent under the weight of this black spring. Being "normal" in this geography is itself a form of madness.

می‌گویند دارو بخور و مشاوره بگیر تا دوباره «کارآمد» شوی. اما این رنج، بیماری نیست؛ این تنها بخشِ بیدار است که زیر بارِ این بهارِ سیاه، قد خم نکرده. «نرمال بودن» در این جغرافیا، خودش نوعی جنون است.

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