Sahar        Tarighi

“Run For Our Rights”

Video (Performance Documentation)

2022

Video Credit: Yoosef Mohamadi

 

In December 2021, after Ai Weiwei initiated the open call Run for Our Rights by posting a video of himself running on a treadmill in solidarity with human rights struggles, I responded by creating a live performance translated into film. This four-channel video is dedicated to all Kurdish language teachers, with particular focus on Zara Mohammadi, a Kurdish activist and language teacher who was sentenced to ten years in prison for teaching Kurdish in Kurdistan.

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The performance consists of a continuous, Sisyphean act of running while entangled in red yarn. The gesture is deliberately repetitive and unresolved. Running becomes both movement and stasis—effort without arrival. It reflects the lived reality of communities forced to struggle endlessly simply to exist, speak, and remember. For Kurdish people, language itself becomes a contested body; its suppression operates as a form of linguicide, where teaching one’s mother tongue is treated as an act of defiance. In this context, running functions as a metaphor for survival under systems that criminalize identity.

 

Drawing on James C. Scott’s concept of hidden transcripts, the work frames resistance not as spectacle but as persistence. Power often operates through silencing and the normalization of exhaustion and fear. Here, resistance emerges through repetition, breath, and endurance rather than overt confrontation. The body continues moving even when escape is impossible.

The camera bears witness to labor and strain. The body becomes the site where political violence is registered and where refusal quietly takes form. This work insists that even when voices are suppressed, the body remembers and carries forward. Running here is not about arrival; it is about refusing disappearance.