Sahar        Tarighi

Show Me Where the Roj-helat is?

2024

Ceramics, cement, sand, video

Size: Variable

 

Show Me Where the Roj-helat Is? explores displacement and the body's capacity to carry place. Organic ceramic forms, marked by the imprint of fingerprints, were made in my studio in Delaware before traveling with me across the United States. They were soda-fired at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, finger molds were produced at Penland School of Craft, and the forms were later pit-fired during a residency at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts before returning to my studio. Their movement became inseparable from the work itself. As the objects crossed landscapes and accumulated material transformations, they mirrored the ways displaced bodies carry memory, change, and traces of every place they pass through.

 

The visceral forms are ultimately filled with fired ceramic fingers fixed in place with cement. The fingers evoke both intrusion and presence. They may be read as embodiments of systems that penetrate, regulate, and occupy everyday life, while simultaneously recalling my ongoing investigation of fingerprints as markers of identity, memory, and bureaucratic control. Suspended between protection and violation, they ask whose bodies are permitted to belong and whose remain continually marked.

 

The title refers to Rojhelat, the Kurdish word meaning both “the East” and “the place where the sun rises,” as well as the eastern region of Kurdistan - my homeland. By dividing the word into Roj-helat, I transform the hyphen into a border, a visual interruption that mirrors the political fragmentation of Kurdistan.

 

The installation is accompanied by a projected video that extends the work into time. The projection falls onto the wall and across the ceramic forms themselves. The video documents unfired slip-cast fingers slowly dissolving in the current of a creek. As water gradually erodes the clay, the fingers lose their form until they disappear entirely. This slow disintegration enacts displacement, materializing the precarity of bodies forced into movement by political violence. It reflects the countless lives that vanish along migration routes and contested borders, where displacement is not only the loss of place but, too often, the loss of life itself.