ARTIST STATEMENT
My work examines the human body as a living archive that carries memory, labor, trauma, and care across generations. Shaped by experiences of displacement and ethnic violence in Kurdistan, my practice understands the body as an active site of survival and transmission, where history is held not only through language but through gesture, touch, and material memory. As a child in Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan), I witnessed families fleeing the aftermath of the Anfal Genocide in Bashur (Southern Kurdistan), where my family welcomed one family into our home for several months. These early encounters with forced displacement continue to shape how I engage with memory, body, and land.
Having lived in Kurdistan for three decades before becoming part of the diaspora, I inhabit a layered sense of presence and absence, approaching my work through a feminist and decolonial lens that challenges colonial narratives and centers embodied knowledge as a site of resistance. My practice spans ceramics, sculpture, installation, video, and social practice, engaging materials such as clay, textiles, yarn, and found objects.
I approach clay not only as a medium but as land, a living archive of memory and labor. Textiles reference women’s care, lineage, and repair through processes of stitching, mending, coiling, and casting. Drawing from Kurdish mythology, oral histories, and suppressed matriarchal cosmologies, figures such as Şamaran function as frameworks for imagining feminine sovereignty, ecological interdependence, and non-colonial futures. For me, art-making is both method and archive—a space where silenced stories surface and resistance becomes material.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sahar Tarighi is a Kurdish interdisciplinary artist, currently based in Columbus, OH, in the United States. Working in ceramics, sculpture, installation, video, and social practice, her work is rooted in the lived experiences and collective memory of displaced and marginalized communities, particularly her own Kurdish heritage.
Tarighi draws from ancestral myths, traditional crafts, and oral histories—especially those passed down by Kurdish women—to explore themes of displacement, resilience, cultural erasure, and embodied resistance. Through material engagement with clay, textiles, yarn and found objects, she creates spaces where personal and political histories can resurface, where body and land intertwine as living archives. Her research and studio practice investigate the intersections of memory, identity, and the decolonial imaginary, with a focus on Kurdish feminism, alternative epistemologies, and storytelling as forms of resistance to hegemonic structures.
Tarighi’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally. She has received several awards and fellowships, including Second Place in the 2025 Edward F. Hayes Advanced Research Forum at The Ohio State University. She was selected for Project M at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, a program supported by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Other honors include the Maxwell Hanrahan Foundation Scholarship, and full scholarships to the Penland School of Craft and the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts through the Windgate and TCN Fellowships. Sahar is currently a Post-MFA Scholar in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University.
© Sahar Tarighi