Golnaz Payani (b. 1986, Iran) is a contemporary artist whose work revolves around themes of disappearance, trace, and perception. Payani recalls years after the war ended, the media regularly broadcasted lists of missing people and those found after years of captivity. Her childhood was a constant conflict between ostensible appearance and invisible privacy. Payani’s work captures moments to reveal various temporal realities. She extracts the object from time, analyzes and dissects it in its precise state at a given moment, like a surgical slice. She closely examines this reality and ponders the connections that persist between the object, its trace, and its trajectory.