خلسه عجیب (Strange Ecstasy I expands and trouble the classical European tradition of depicting religious trance or ecstasy, such as in Bernini’s St. Theresa. Painted in oil from self-portrait sketches done during orgasm and swaddled in velvet quilts sewn from used clothing, these faces straddle the line between pain and pleasure, the earthly and the divine. The title uses the Farsi and Urdu word “عجیب (ajeeb)”, which references the strange, the frightening, and the wondrous simultaneously, perhaps best translated in English as “queer.”

The circular tondo format of the works mirror both the domed heaven-like ceilings of Renaissance cathedrals, as well the wide-open orifice at the center of these expressions. One is reminded of an excerpt from Anne Carson’s essay “The Gender of Sound": “Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death." In these paintings, the door is left open and the monster is let out.