Journey to You, marks the first iteration of a new body of work exploring queerness in 19th century Iranian culture through the histories of domestic labour, myth, and superstition. The work centres on a laser projection animation of a 'Persian magic carpet' – a design born from Jalilipour's research into Persian carpet motifs, homoerotic imagery in Persian manuscripts, and classical Sufi literature.

The laser animation showcases two women, in Qajar-era style, in an intimate gesture, freely and shamelessly exposed, flying on the magic carpet. The image of the two women arrive from paintings in a 19th century Persian sex manuscript named Lizzat Al-Nisa (Pleasure of Women), a richly illustrated text exploring desire, Intimacy and heterosexual sex which Jalilipour has digitally altered to create queer scenarios.

Through what he describes as "speculative historical artefacts," Jalilipour's practice bridges archival documentation and imaginative storytelling, harnessing present-day technology to materialise queer pasts that were systematically prevented from taking tangible form. The Persian carpet holds an important place in Iranian culture both as a domestic object and one of economical value. One classical pattern on the carpet is of the garden, a representation of Pardees (garden of Eden in Farsi) in or Paradise (in English). By inscribing explicit queer imagery onto this sacred object, Jalilipour makes a political statement: queer people are inseparable from Iranian history, and romanticised visions of the afterlife belong to us too. The magic carpet, that exoticised travelling tool often granted to underdogs in folklore, becomes a vehicle for queer temporal mobility – allowing suppressed histories to materialise in contemporary space.

The laser projection format is crucial to this reimagining. Working with an animator and programmer, Jalilipour translates hand-drawn imagery into limited- frame laser animation, creating what he describes as a "magical atmosphere." This brief, condensed format functions like a symbolic ritual, distilling centuries of erased queer existence into looping gestures of intimacy and care. The work embraces digital presentation's defining characteristics – reproducibility, adaptability across spaces, circulation – while maintaining the auratic quality traditionally associated with sacred objects and museum artefacts.

In the laser animation, we see a simpler version of the image, almost like an advertisement sign, promoting the queer histories hidden from the archives. In the extended animation, the women are surrounded by objects, inspired by various rituals and traditions led by Iranian women, as documented in Kulsum Naneh, a classic Persian text recording women's customs, intimate practices, and social rituals across different regions of Persia – knowledge systems that existed outside patriarchal archival structures.

This commission represents HERVISIONS' commitment to supporting artists who use digital tools to challenge colonial and heteronormative historical narratives. Jalilipour's practice honours the curatorial agency's dedication to understanding emerging technologies not as a break from cultural tradition but as methods for making visible what has been systematically erased – creating space where queer Iranian histories can finally materialise and circulate.

Jalilipour transforms the Persian magic carpet from orientalist object into queer time machine, where laser-projected animations of 19th century style queer intimacy loop eternally – historical recuperation occurring not despite but through the technological reproducibility that allows suppressed narratives to finally circulate and persist.

Working with an animator and programmer, Kasra translates hand-drawn imagery into limited-frame laser animation, exemplifying what @hervisions_ terms ‘laser grammar’: treating lasers not simply as projection tools, but as syntactic agents that write, erase, and re-sequence information through time-based activations.

Kasra Jalilipour’s installation is co-presented by HERVISIONS and transmediale.