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.
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