Art and Culture: Sahar Tarighi

"For me, Şamaran offers a way to connect inherited mythology with contemporary experiences of gender, power, and resistance. Her story allows me to question how historical narratives are constructed, whose knowledge is valued, and how cultural memory can be reclaimed and reimagined."

Sahar Tarighi is a Kurdish artist and educator from Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan) whose practice investigates the body and land as living archives. She works across mediums like ceramics, sculpture, installation, textile arts, video, and participatory practices. She researches the histories of displacement, labor, care, cultural erasure, and resistance. 

Using Kurdish mythology, oral history and collective memory, her work seeks to destabilize the dominant narration of history while envisioning various ways of belonging and collective futures. 

Following her MA in Painting in Tehran, Tarighi moved to the U.S. and earned her MFA in Studio Art at the University of Delaware in 2024. She is currently a Post-MFA Scholar in the Ceramics area of the Department of Art at The Ohio State University. Through studies of Shamaran, the mythic half-snake, half-woman creature of Kurdish lore, Tarighi examines notions of femininity, patriarchy, knowledge and perseverance. In her wide-ranging practice, she examines the balancing of remembering acts of violence and celebrating life, and the capacity of art to hold histories and project future realities. 

Can you begin by telling me about yourself?

My name is Sahar Tarighi. I am a Kurdish interdisciplinary artist from Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan). I was born during the Iran–Iraq War, a period that also witnessed the Anfal Genocide against the Kurdish people in Bashur (Southern Kurdistan).

Growing up in Rojhelat, I witnessed Kurdish families fleeing Saddam Hussein's regime, including one family who lived in our home for several months. Before I understood the political forces behind their displacement, I encountered its consequences through people's stories, experiences of loss, and ruptured relationships to land. Although I did not directly experience the genocide, these early encounters with displacement and its lasting effects shaped my understanding of how personal and collective histories are carried across generations. They continue to inform my artistic practice, particularly my interest in the body and land as living archives and in how art can give presence to histories that have been silenced or erased.

I currently serve as a Post-MFA Scholar in the Ceramics area of the Department of Art at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. After completing my graduate studies in Tehran, I moved to the United States to pursue further education, earning my MFA in Studio Art from the University of Delaware in 2024.

Can you share more about your artistic journey, from receiving your MA to pursuing your MFA and coming to the United States?

Art has always been part of my family. From an early age, I watched my mother working with her hands, sewing, embroidering, mending, and making things. These everyday acts of care and labor became important influences on my practice. My sister's admission to Art College was a turning point for me. Growing up in a small town in Kurdistan without an art high school, I hadn't realized that art could be something I could pursue academically or professionally. When I was eighteen, I was accepted into an art teacher-training college in Tehran, which marked the beginning of my formal art education.

After graduating, I began teaching visual arts in Kurdistan while continuing my own education, eventually earning both a BA and an MA. I also spent a decade teaching ceramics at an art school in Tehran. During those years, I experimented with different materials and became increasingly drawn to working in three dimensions. There was something about working directly with clay that felt natural to me. I realized it was a material through which I could express my ideas in ways I hadn't been able to before.

Although ceramics remains central to my practice, my work also extends into sculpture, installation, video, performance, socially engaged art, and curatorial projects.

What influences your choice of medium when you are working with particular themes or ideas?

I understand the body and land as interconnected living archives, where histories of displacement, labor, care, and resistance accumulate across generations. My interest lies in how personal experiences connect to collective memory, particularly histories that have been fragmented, silenced, or erased.

Clay is meaningful to me because it comes directly from the earth and carries associations with labor, touch, transformation, and time. Land is not simply a geographical location; it holds relationships between people, ancestors, cultural knowledge, and histories of belonging and dispossession.

Migration has also transformed my relationship with land. Living away from Kurdistan has made me more attentive to how memory and belonging persist beyond geographical boundaries. Working with clay allows me to negotiate these relationships through material processes. My choice of medium ultimately depends on the conceptual questions I am exploring.

Left: What Her Hand Holds. Right: Xał خاڵ: A Legacy of Resilience.

What have you discovered while working with clay?

For me, working with clay begins long before making a form. Collecting clay involves digging into the earth, observing its layers, gathering the material, and bringing it back to the studio to process and refine. Each stage becomes part of the artistic journey.

I see this process as a form of material research. Clay carries geological time and traces of human and nonhuman life. It connects me to histories embedded in the land and to relationships between bodies, labor, and the environment.

I am particularly interested in transformation. When clay is fired, it undergoes an irreversible change while retaining traces of its previous state. This relationship between transformation, preservation, and disappearance resonates with my understanding of memory.

Working with clay becomes a dialogue between my body and the material. I respond to its possibilities and limitations, while it responds to my gestures. This reciprocal relationship allows me to explore how memories and histories are carried, transformed, and preserved.

You describe the body as a kind of living archive. How do you approach translating the body and exploring that archive?

One example is my Şamaran project, which began several years ago and has evolved through sculpture, installation, exhibitions, and participatory workshops.

I grew up with the mythology of Şamaran, the half-woman, half-snake figure embedded in Kurdish cultural traditions. I remember seeing her image as a child, and she remained with me. I have always been interested in stories passed down by my mother, grandmother, and other women in my life, particularly how cultural knowledge survives through oral traditions.

I began working with Şamaran to reconsider inherited narratives through feminist and decolonial perspectives, particularly how women's bodies, knowledge, and histories have been represented, controlled, and silenced.

Şamaran has traditionally appeared as a two-dimensional figure in embroidery and painting. I wanted to give her a sculptural presence, reimagining how inherited stories could inhabit contemporary spaces.

I also became interested in braiding as a cultural and sculptural language. Braiding exists across Kurdish communities and carries meanings related to identity, care, and collective knowledge.

I use a fabric slip-casting technique in which I saturate textiles with liquid clay, manipulate and braid them, and fire them in a kiln. During firing, the fabric burns away, leaving behind a ceramic structure that preserves traces of its original form. This process of disappearance and preservation speaks to cultural erasure and the persistence of memory, revealing how histories survive through fragments and material traces.

Eventually, I wanted the work to move beyond my individual experience and become a space for collective participation. Through public workshops, participants braid together while exchanging stories and memories. Their contributions are fired and incorporated into the sculptures, allowing the work to accumulate collective knowledge across communities and locations.

Ceramics embodies both fragility and resilience. It can break easily, yet once fired, it can endure for thousands of years. This contradiction resonates with the vulnerability and persistence of bodies, cultures, and histories. I approach these sculptures as a form of counter-archive, preserving personal and collective experiences that are often absent from official historical narratives.

Left: SHAMARAN شاماران. Right: Her Braids Bear the Borders.

Mythology is an important aspect of your work. How do you view the interaction between myth, pain, beauty, and contemporary life?

I understand mythology as a living form of cultural knowledge. Şamaran's story exists across different parts of Kurdistan, including Bakur, Bashur, Rojhelat, and Rojava, with variations reflecting the richness of oral traditions.

In different versions of the story, Şamaran's wisdom, knowledge, and existence become entangled with the desires and actions of men. I became interested in these relationships through questions of femininity, patriarchal power, and control over women's bodies and knowledge.

These questions remain deeply relevant. Women's knowledge and experiences have frequently been marginalized or excluded from dominant historical narratives. Similar processes exist in Kurdish history, where cultural practices, languages, and collective memories have faced suppression and erasure.

For me, Şamaran offers a way to connect inherited mythology with contemporary experiences of gender, power, and resistance. Her story allows me to question how historical narratives are constructed, whose knowledge is valued, and how cultural memory can be reclaimed and reimagined.

Şamaran embodies the dualities of venom and cure, death and regeneration, concealment and revelation. These contradictions resonate with Kurdish cultural experiences, where histories of violence and erasure coexist with traditions of healing, storytelling, and resistance.

What messages or ideas do you hope people take away from your art?

I hope they smile. Whether someone visits an exhibition or encounters my work online, I hope they leave with curiosity and take something meaningful with them.

I would love for people to learn more about Kurdistan, Kurdish art, history, language, music, etc. While my practice addresses displacement, violence, and cultural erasure, it is equally concerned with resilience, joy, care, and the persistence of collective knowledge.

I hope my work encourages audiences to question whose histories are preserved, whose voices are heard, and whose experiences remain marginalized. Ultimately, I see art not only as a way of remembering the past but also as a space for imagining different futures.