Moving fluidly between observational and speculative spaces, Movahed’s work depicts imagined environments shaped by her layered relationship with the physical and psychological spaces she has inhabited. For her, built environment is not a passive backdrop but an active site where contrasting realities intersect and coexist. Having grown up in Tehran, one of the most politically charged cities in the Middle East, she witnessed how public spaces can became possibilities for social and political interaction. Her lived experience under a totalitarian system of government where urban space is built to impose control yet continually disrupted by everyday acts of civil disobedience informs her interest in the dynamics of public spaces as sites of storytelling, expression, and collective memory. In her paintings, Movahed employs urban and natural metaphors such as walls, windows, signs, torn posters and graffiti to investigate the liminal spaces between power and resistance. Her work asks: How do systems of control shape our bodies and the environments we inhabit? And how do we, in turn, respond by resisting, adapting, reinterpreting, and reimagining those spaces? Working across painting, drawing, collage and printmaking, she emphasizes the tensions embedded in public and domestic spaces through navigating between opposing visual possibilities such as flatness and depth, rough textures and soft brushwork, static structures and dynamic movement.