Elif Painting

I am Jamaleddin Toomajnia. Toomaj is a name of a Turkmen tribe. I was born in 1981 in Gonbade Kavoos in Iran, one of three cities that called Turkmen Sahra. My paintings are inspiring my life as a Turk-men in Iran. We live in contradictory life in Iran today between tradition and modernity Turk-men people as Sunni Muslims have own traditions and own unique clothes, they have symbolic carpet patterns and embroideries. A hundred years ago Turk-men people lived in a nomadic way in their bowers named ‘Oy.' Nowadays they are living in Turkmenistan and two big cities in Iran, Gonbade Kavoos and Bandar Torkaman. They have own rituals and their ideas about the world. In fact, maybe I am tired of this paradoxical world and in my research in painting, I want to escape from some aspects of the traditional world that cause restricted thoughts. In my works, I try to show my paradoxical view to the world that it came from my complicated society.