Sahar Tarighi
Your Lines Set Me on Fire - هێڵەکانت دایگیرساندم
2023 - 2024
"Sahar Tarighi extends her identity into the world by weaving, unraveling, shaping, and dissolving symbolic, fragmented representations of her forensic identity. The visual element in this series of works on the wall is the fingerprint, one's unique attribute, immutable, inimitable, and traceable. The red threads extending out of the pieces symbolize democratic freedom, the red ink residue after having marked a voting ballot, but also blood, spilled onto a demolished, scarred ground. The digit that made that mark is then reproduced and multiplied in clay, creating an army of one, a force to be reckoned with, and, paradoxically, rendered anonymous.
Conceptually, the work also challenges traditional notions of belonging beyond borders; the video projected behind a series of "fossilized" fingers, explores a universal sense of belonging, a return to tenderness, a return to the water, that will, for a while at least, carry traces of Sahar".
Your Lines Set Me on Fire
هێڵەکانت دایگیرساندم
Ceramics, yarn, wood, dowel, clay
2024
Your Lines Set Me on Fire is a mixed-media diptych that begins with a fingerprint, a mark that is at once deeply personal and socially legible. It is the trace through which we recognize ourselves and the trace through which institutions identify, classify, and record us. Across two blue pegboards, I reconstruct the same fingerprint through two distinct material languages, asking what happens when identity is woven, repeated, fragmented, and undone.
In one panel, red yarn is woven around hundreds of wooden dowels, transforming the fingerprint into a three-dimensional topography. As the pattern descends, it gradually loosens until it spills onto the floor in a tangled mass. Still attached to the fingerprint, the thread becomes an extension of the body, a lifeline carrying memory, attachment, ancestry, and inherited burdens beyond the limits of the image itself.
The second panel reconstructs the same fingerprint using nearly four hundred slip-cast replicas of one’s index finger. Individual fingers collectively produce the singular mark of identity, yet the image slowly dissolves toward its base, where it collapses into a mound of raw clay. Identity here is neither fixed nor complete; it is continuously assembled, eroded, and remade.
Together, the works propose the fingerprint not simply as proof of individuality but as a living archive. Through repetition, accumulation, and gradual disappearance, Your Lines Set Me on Fire reflects on how identity is carried by bodies, shaped by histories, and continually negotiated between memory and erasure.