Sara Abbaspour

Floating Ocean is a long-term photographic project rooted in the poetics of spaces in transition—physical, cultural, and psychological—shaped by the artist’s background in urban studies and Persian literature, particularly the poetry of Rumi.

Drawn to spaces in states of limbo, where vulnerability, intimacy, and history converge, and where people and environments remain in constant relation—shifting between interior and exterior, visible and invisible. Developed over more than a decade, the work reflects both a changing social landscape in Iran and a transformation within the artist herself. Most of the photographs were made in 2019 and 2024, emerging from unanticipated encounters, ongoing conversations, and collaborative exchanges.

The project brings together portraits, landscapes, and urbanscapes that trace thresholds between private and public space, resilience and precarity. Sara Abbaspour approaches the work as a sequence rather than a set of discrete images—a flow shaped by connection and rupture. The title Floating Ocean suggests a self adrift within shifting meanings, navigating the space between the personal and the political.