“I found these wonderful sketches a few years ago during a studio visit with Ali Shayesteh in Tehran. He had set up all of his recent works that included paintings, sculptures, ­drawings, and works on fabric on the floor around his studio, and I kept browsing through all of them. When I started going through the sketches, I started imagining several characters in my head over a series of episodes. I imagined a large urn with drawings around them in several rows, each row looping one of those chapters over and over again.“ An excerpt from the book’s introduction by Ashkan Zahraei.