Sahar        Tarighi

What Her Hand Holds 

Ceramics 

30.30.20 cm

2025 

 

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This ceramic work engages movement as a carrier of memory, labor, and intergenerational transmission. It is inspired by my mother’s hands during a period of displacement around 1980, when my family worked briefly in a brick factory in Hamedan to escape a war zone in Kurdistan. I was not yet born, yet her embodied experiences reached me through storytelling and a recorded cassette—the only physical means of connection between family members at that time.

 

The work centers on a single ceramic hand marked with a traditional Kurdish tattoo, standing on a melted ceramic brick and holding a cast piece of white fabric traditionally wrapped around the arms in Kurdish dress. This fabric, known as Feqyane, is worn by both women and men and carries cultural, protective, and bodily significance. In Kurdish women’s clothing, the long sleeves often end in a flared, dangling triangular form that can be wrapped individually around each arm or knotted freely behind the body. This conical form can also echo the Zagros Mountains.

 

Movement emerges through the distorted ceramic surfaces created by soda firing, the flowing tension of the fabric, and tattooed gestures carried across generations. The work holds movement at the moment when memory shifts, travels, and endures.