Who is talking?
He is interested in qualities and identities that were never chosen.
We build our reality — or, to be more precise, we choose a lens to view it with — from pieces that arrived before we could ever examine them. Then we wake up inside it and call it a life.
H.R. Torkaman (Hamidreza Torkaman) is an artist, graphic designer, writer and independent researcher, currently based in Dubai. He has lived, studied and worked across Iran, Australia and the United Arab Emirates, and writes in English and in Persian, his native language.
He holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts in Graphic Design from the University of Wollongong in Australia, and has spent more than ten years working in design, branding and visual communication. In 2025 he founded HERT, an independent studio for graphic design, branding and creative direction. Its name comes from the Persian ‘Shahr-e Hert’, a city without conventional rules — chaotic, but open to endless possibilities. HERT is also the name under which his books are published.
Peel another layer
His written work starts from one simple question: what is a person actually made of? His research approaches it from phenomenology, neuroscience, social theory and the philosophy of personal identity, and separates carefully what the evidence establishes from what it only suggests. His fiction takes the same question somewhere research cannot go: into buildings that teach their tenants to smile, people that command the weather, a dream laboratory where wanting and seeking start to behave like a force.
The work does not aim at conclusions. Torkaman is interested in the layers beneath an ordinary life, the habits, inherited stories and borrowed voices that a person mistakes for a self. He writes to make those layers visible, and to leave the reader with a better question than the one they arrived with. Each book is accompanied by a visual series of his own.
In his own voice
I am interested in the mechanisms and qualities in a character that were never chosen.
Most of what we identify with as self arrives before we can examine it: a language, a root, a city’s rhythm, a face we learn to wear because it fits the environment and makes others comfortable. We build our reality — or, to be more precise, we create and choose a lens to view our reality with — from these pieces, then wake up inside it and call it life.
I work across research, fiction and visual speech because each one reaches a different layer and allows expression at a different depth. Research tells me what can honestly be claimed. Fiction takes over where evidence stops. Images hold what neither can say: a surface, and the one thread beneath it all.
I am not looking for conclusions, nor providing any answers. A conclusion closes a door, and the work I care about leaves possibilities. If a reader leaves with a question more precise, or even just different, than the one they brought, the work has done what it could.
Everything answers. Nothing obeys.
Between those two sentences is where I would like to keep working.