Sour Things: The Door

multimedia installation, proculain, ceramics, 4 videos, sound piece, ink drawings. 

The Door is the latest chapter of Sour Things, a habitat in dispersal. The ceramic curtain of raw white stones constructs a conditional passage, the body caught in an act of negotiation. In Arabic, ḥajar binds stone to prohibition; hajarameans to migrate, to abandon. Close in sound, distinct in root, both trace a single rupture: separation. The stone that halts the body is the same that sets it in motion.

Maps and names of ingredients - zaatar, sumac, saffron, dill seeds, dates, pomegranate - circulate across sculptures and drawings. Despite obstructions and enclosures, diasporic voices in the films attest to the persistence of what has always circulated: tastes, recipes, people, forms of transmission that precede and exceed borders.

The artist's ancestors traded okra - bamieh - across the Levant and North Africa. Porcelain forms of the plant scatter across the ground. Too tender to speak, too heavy to swallow, reads one. A viscous memory, another. Some retain their shape; others collapse, split, as if pressure had worked their bodies from within. Yet viscosity resists rupture. Dried to endure transit, the pod carries, in its cellular structure, a knowledge of return.

Curatorial text  by Anne Davidian. 

Produced by Nika Project Space