Ruins of a Body

On January 8th, 2020, flight PS752 was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile. Among the 176 lives lost was Ghanimat Azhdari, a PhD student at the University of Guelph. Her death was sudden and violent and left behind a silence too vast to contain.

Azamat, whose life is now rooted in London, carries the weight of that loss every day. Ruins of a Body is a portrait of grief that migrates across continents, through years, and into the quiet hours of the present. It is about the intimate fallout of tragedy and the slow, unsteady process of surviving it.

The project weaves together still photographs, moving images, and intimate artifacts left by Ghanimat—a diary, a necklace with a pomegranate pendant, and worn pieces of jewellery. These objects carry presence beyond absence, material traces of a life abruptly ended.

This is a work about the quiet endurance of love and the spaces it inhabits after death. Grief, here, is not resolved. It is carried. And in that carrying, a form of resilience emerges—fragile, unfinished, deeply human.