The Revolt – (Chapter I)
The resounding voice of the Zanj endures through a series of sculptures carved from pure natural salt. Salt was the only material available to the Zanj, who were forcibly brought to southern Iraq as enslaved laborers and compelled to clean the vast saline marshlands along the Tigris and Euphrates. Exploited under brutal conditions, they left no written archive—only the landscape itself retained traces of their suffering.
By sculpting directly into salt slabs, this series seeks to echo the voices of the Zanj in a material that shaped both their daily labor and their resistance. Among the sculptures is a text-based piece, carved from a fragment of a letter recounting a young man’s memory of his father’s experience during the rebellion. The text appears incomplete—its missing portions a reminder of erosion, time, and the fragility of histories that were never formally recorded. This deliberate fragmentation reinforces the idea of the sculpture as a relic, a recovered trace whose survival feels both accidental and essential.
Together, these works function as fragile counter-memories, offering perspectives that are absent from official chronicles. They present the Zanj not through the voices of their oppressors but through imagined reconstructions grounded in material, landscape, and lived memory.
Text-based sculpture & translation
“My father told me about their rebellion that lasted for fourteen years, against ……… to achieve justice and social equality. He said: We were brought forcibly, bound in chains, from our homes and lands, herded like sheep in a flock. We were marginalized and exploited like animals because of the color of our ……… They brought us here by force without our women and families to work in ……… the salt in the plains of Basra. To make the rich richer. We worked without pause, living a life unfit for any human, we slept in the open, and our compensation after a long day was a small quantity of dates and a handful of wheat. Many of us fell ill and died due to the polluted environment and mosquitoes fed on us alive. Our only recourse was to document our miserable social conditions on slabs of salt, hoping………”
Installation views
Views of sculptures
Details:
- Relief carved in natural salt
- Natural salt slabs
- Metal display brackets
- Dim.: var.
- 56 × 62 cm
- 35 × 33 cm
- 40 × 29 cm
- 35 × 36 cm
- 38 × 53 cm
- 36 × 48 cm
- 25 × 34 cm
- 43 × 37 cm
- 30 × 51 cm