Sahar Tarighi
"SHAMARAN شاماران"
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“Shamaran شاماران ”
2022
Ceramics, fabric, clay slip, foam, yarn, acrylic paint
Size: Variable
This installation recontextualizes the widespread Kurdish myth of Shamaran, also known as Şahmaran or Şaymeran, a half snake, half woman figure who embodies knowledge, healing, and resistance. My first encounter with her dates back to childhood, when I saw a painted image on the wall of a neighbor's home. That early impression remained with me as a powerful symbol of ancestral memory and feminine strength. Later, I came to understand Shamaran not merely as a mythical figure, but as an embodied epistemology: a vessel of wisdom, a feminist deity, and a guardian of oral history that continues to shape Kurdish identity across generations.
Oral variations of Shamaran's story circulate throughout Kurdistan, each affirming her central role in collective memory. In the best known version, a young man named Jamasb becomes trapped in a cave during a honey harvesting trip. There, he discovers a hidden realm where Shamaran lives peacefully among thousands of snakes. She exists in harmony with the land and the natural world, her body reflecting the rhythms of the earth and emphasizing the profound relationship between women, body, and land. They fall in love, and she teaches him the secrets of medicinal plants and the rhythms of life. Although he eventually returns to the surface, he vows to keep her existence a secret. Years later, when a king falls ill, the vizier forces Jamasb to reveal her location. Shamaran is captured and brought to the palace. Calm and dignified, she instructs the men to divide her body: her head will bring death, her body healing, and her tail wisdom. In a final act of resistance, she overturns their plan, bringing death to the corrupt vizier, healing to the king, and her wisdom to Jamasb. Her story endures through oral tradition and textiles, embodying resistance, sacrifice, justice, and feminine knowledge.
Shamaran's origins can be traced to the Neolithic period, connecting her to early matriarchal cosmologies and ecospiritual belief systems that honored feminine divinity and the interconnectedness of all life. She embodies dualities: venom and cure, death and regeneration, concealment and revelation. Her image, woven into embroidered fabrics, curtains, and tapestries, continues to protect women's spaces in Kurdish homes, linking her presence to memory, resistance, and decolonial forms of cultural preservation.
In sculpting her form from clay, I drew from traditional painted and embroidered representations of Shamaran and translated them into three dimensional form. I used fabric casting to create her braids, emphasizing the cultural significance of braided hair in Kurdish tradition. Like the land itself, braiding carries continuity, identity, and care. It becomes a metaphor for memory woven into the body, connecting women to one another and to the earth. I painted motifs inspired by Kurdish clothing onto the white clay covered fabric and embedded traditional tattoo patterns across Shamaran's body. Braids and serpent forms rise around her, surrounding the figure as extensions of her strength and ancestral wisdom, grounding her as both protector and keeper of knowledge.
Her body becomes a site where myth, memory, and material converge. Shamaran is not a relic of the past, but a living critique, a feminine, mythical, and political force suppressed by colonial and patriarchal systems. Through this work, I invoke her as a bearer of knowledge, a guardian, and a vision of a liberated future rooted in Kurdish cultural memory and oral tradition.
Shamaran, Berman Museum, Photo Credit Joseph Hu
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Threads of Transformation: شاماران Şamaran, Berman Museum, Jan 15 – May 15, 2024, Collegeville, PA, Photo Credit Joseph Hu
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Shamaran - Ki me Ez? – Who Am I?, Mason Exhibitions Arlington, Sep 5 - Oct 25, 2025, Arlington, VA
Shamaran/شاماران, Solo show, Recitation Hall Gallery, Nov 29, 2022 – Feb, 10, 2023 , Newark, DE
“Sha-maran,” “Şah-meran,” is a mythical goddess, half snake half woman. The first human she encounters is a young man “Jamasb” or “Camasb.” Jamasb gets stuck in a cave trying to harvest honey, his friends leave him behind. In his effort to find a way out he ends up in a magical realm full of thousands of snakes living harmoniously with Shamaran. They fall in love and Shamaran teaches Jamasb the ways of the earth, medicine and life. After a while he misses his life above the ground and promises to keep her whereabouts secret from the rest of the humans.
Many years pass, the king of his city falls ill and the Vezier determines only the flesh of Shamaran can heal the king while scheming to use that as an excuse to steal Shamaran’s infinite wisdom. They finally suspect Jamasb and bring him in and by threatening his family make him give up Shamaran’s location. Once she arrives in the palace, she says cut me in three pieces, if you eat my head you will die, if you eat my body you will be healed from any diseases and if you eat my tail you will inherit my infinite wisdom. The Vezier makes Jamasb eat her head, give the body to the king and he eats the tail. It turns out she tricked them. The Vezier dies instantly, the king’s illness gets cured and Jamasb inherits all her wisdom.
This myth is widespread in all regions of Kurdistan. Her image is used in tapestry and spangled fabrics to decorate curtains, bed covers and as a protective symbol in girl’s rooms across Kurdistan. She lives through stories to a point Mardin city in Northern Kurdistan (Kurdish region of Turkey) the locals believe this is her city, and even believe the Hemmam of the city is where she was divided in three.
Recent anthropologists recognize the journey of this myth throughout Anatolia into Greece. They connect it to the concept of eudaimonia impacting Aristotle in the formulation of the Nicomachean Ethics. A state of highest human good through which they find what we describe is being content. In formulation of this concept he boils it down to "The good composed of all goods; an ability which suffices for living well; perfection in respect of virtue; resources sufficient for a living creature."
She is a woman in a harmonious state of being content with the earth she lives on. She is life, she is the knowledge of life both for human and nonhuman, she is the healing force as an essential element of life, she is the creative force as well and the acceptance of death as part of life all at once. Shamaran is depicted in Kurdish mythology and tapestry with her hair braided on both sides of her head, going down her sides and a body full of spangled scales. Across Kurdistan to this date you see women with braided hair on the both sides of their heads in fully Spangled Kurdish traditional dress especially in weddings and new year (Newroz/ Nowroz) celebrations. Shamaran was a woman who lived free even through her death. Her body acted as a conduit for the ultimate lesson to the three men involved in her life, love and death. This is where this mythology meets today in Kurdistan. She is the definition of the Kurdish Proverb of Jin Jiyan Azadi used in the Kurdish female struggle for the past decades which resurfaced again after the killing of Jina (Mahsa) Amini. Jina a Kurdish woman who was killed by the morality police of Iran, in Tehran. Jina recontextualized this slogan. Her death became a spark in forming a new knowledge of the women in my home; it is acting as a healing force amongst the formerly divided and diseased factions of the society in Iran as well. Jina as a symbol is also punishing the abusers of power, the ones who are committing atrocities against the people.
An exhibition note by Pedram Baldari
Nov 2022