"Encounter" is a personal reading of the phenomenon of military service and war—an experience that manifested in two different yet intertwined narratives at two stages of Masih Mostajeran’s life. This series is an attempt to reconstruct memory, reconsider childhood fears, and explore an experience that was repeated differently in his youth. Formed through archival photographs and the appropriation of existing images, this project transforms historical records into a deeply personal narrative, blurring the line between documentation and interpretation.

The first episode emerges from his father’s family album, where photographs from his father’s military service during the Iran-Iraq war mark the artist's first childhood encounter with war. In these images, a young father stands in the frame, but in the child’s mind, the fear of gunfire, death, and absence becomes intertwined. For the child, war is not an external reality but an imagined image, fragmented in photographs and childhood perception.

Years later, this encounter takes on a new form in his youth. In the second episode, during his own military service, Masih discovers an album in a forgotten storage room, containing portraits of soldiers who were martyred during the same war. These painted portraits of soldiers who never returned are forever captured in these images, with sincerity and unpretentiousness. Confronting this album again brings the childhood memory to life. This time, among hundreds of faces, he searches for his own—wondering whether he could have been one of them. Would the fate of him and his generation have been the same, if, in an era when news of a new war was heard daily, a bullet had been fired?

In the third episode, this search reaches its conclusion: a portrait of him, painted by his friend, alongside the soldiers whose lives the war interrupted. An image that blurs the boundaries between the past and the present, mixing presence and absence, and leaving a question unanswered.