Sahar        Tarighi

“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 Şay-meran—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 on, I came to understand Shamaran not merely as a mythic figure, but as 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 myth circulate across Kurdish regions throughout the Zagros Mountains and beyond, each affirming her central role in collective memory. In the most well-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 lives in harmony with the land and nature—her body mirroring the earth’s rhythms—further emphasizing the deep connection between women, body, and land. They fall in love, and she teaches him the secrets of plant medicine and the rhythms of life. Though 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 subverts their plan—bringing death to the corrupt vizier, healing to the king, and her wisdom to Jamasb. Her story endures in oral tradition and textiles, embodying themes of resistance, sacrifice, justice, and feminine knowledge.

 

Shamaran’s roots trace back to the Neolithic period, aligning her with early matriarchal cosmologies and ecospiritual belief systems that honored feminine divinity and the interconnectedness of life. She inhabits dualities: venom and cure, death and regeneration, concealment and revelation. Her image—woven into spangled fabrics, curtains, and tapestries—continues to protect women’s spaces in Kurdish homes, linking her presence to memory, resistance, and a decolonial approach to cultural preservation.

 

In sculpting her form from clay, I drew from traditional painted and embroidered representations of Shamaran and translated them into new dimensionality. I used fabric casting to create her braids, emphasizing the cultural significance of braided hair in Kurdish tradition. Like land, braiding holds layers of 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 Kurdish clothing motifs onto the white clay-covered fabric and embedded traditional tattoo patterns onto Shamaran’s body. Braids and serpent forms rise around her, encircling the figure as extensions of her strength and ancestral wisdom—grounding her as both protector and knower.

 

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 summon her as knowledge-bearer, guardian, and a vision for a liberated future rooted in Kurdish cultural and oral memory.