Shiva Khademi, Sana Hosseini, Celeste Sanja Smareglia, SPORK Sound Kitchen (Vytautas Bikauskas & Bailey Polkinghorne), Saadeh Doostbekheir
ALL THAT REMAINS
Curated by Mana Tashakorinia
12—30 April 2025
Open Tue—Sun 5—8 pm
Opening event on Friday 11 April at 6—9 pm
All That Remains
{All That Remains} begins with the idea that ceremonies always leave behind remains, remnants, and residues;
An archive of {sounds echoing between walls and trees, confetti, and dishes to be washed.}
Though the archive is not identical to forms of remembrance or history, it manifests itself in the form of traces. It holds the potential to fragment and destabilize both remembrance as recorded and history as written, challenging their sufficiency as the final account of what has come to pass. *
The archiver holds power and authority through the preservation and interpretation of history, stories, and rituals. Though, the curation of these five ceremonies tries to put together those moments of fracture in the creation of archives; it’s a ceremony of {nightly diggers}.
We tend to preserve moments by capturing sounds, images, and videos; sticky pages of photo albums, and pictures wrapped in plastic covers to last longer. How idealistic of us to put our trust in those ephemeral entities. Photos get lost or torn apart, videos corrupt, and compatible devices eventually become untranslatable. If we’re lucky enough to find fragments, we gaze at them through eyes that have already seen the future.
Here we grab the leftovers of the ceremonies and caw together by a long table to re-imagine and re-member.
* Merewether, Charles, ed. 2006. The Archive. London, Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel ; MIT Press.
On the opening evening, SPORK and those gathered will be making salata khadra mafrooma (Palestinian green salad) and serving it with manaeesh (levant open-faced pies), both from 'The Gaza Kitchen' cookbook. On an assembled table, our knives will chop in and out of ceremonial rhythm. We will prepare a salad and a sound meal, listen, and chew on what's important together.
by the long table
SPORK Sound Kitchen, Vytautas Bikauskas & Bailey Polkinghorne
Self-made table, Kitchenware, Knives with sensor kits, Sound interface, and Speakers
The preparation and serving of food to others is inherently ceremonial, as an extension or confirmation of mutual trust. Sounds of the kitchen announce the sharing that is to come, all waiting, all ready for the occasion. In celebration and in grief, we eat.
This time we make a salad. It puts together what was already there, chopping changes ingredients into dishes. There is no need to cook, just to work together - the winter is over. SPORK invites to set up tables wherever we can, whenever we can, to join with knives, to join in salads.
The work explores the sounds and rituals of communal food preparation, set on a self-made chopping table. Salad and bread are served to participants at the end. Loops of concrete sound and clinking forks are left endlessly repeating after the meal is done.
Shiva Khademi
Factory, Essay, Video, Memory, and History
Stories of the Ceremonies at the Behshahr Textile Factory
He would come to my housetop in the shape of a crow now and then
Celeste Sanja Smareglia
Gifted objects, Silk, Embroidery, Mask, Poetry, and Video
"He would come to my balcony every morning, leaving traces in the soil, leaving offerings from the shadows beneath the known. I would know his voice at the first hearing of it and would go forth to him."
While we usually cannot recognize individual crows, they possess a skill for remembering human faces and the actions performed while wearing them. In this installation I tried to depict the intimate relationship between humans and crows through the ceremonial practice of offering gifts. These ever-present birds, that have filled every shadow of the urban space, have slowly become accustomed to human closeness, while simultaneously remaining ever watchful. Each encounter spirals into a dance of glances. They shrink from the human’s predatory gaze, while the humans still cling to the ancient dread of crows stealing their sight. Weaved into the dark silky sky of the ceremonial shroud are the gifts that I collected through my long-term companionship with a crow. Projected onto the silk is the video performance, where I mirror the crow's rite of giving objects as gifts, attempting to reframe the often cruel scientific studies on crows' memory function, which have frequently been conducted under the guise of masks. Scattered objects, offered to the crow, intertwined with poetry recited in the background, reveal remnants of a lost affective unity with nature, where rituals of divination served as technologies for navigating an uncertain future.
Fete & Fight
Sana Hosseini
Photography, Weddings, and Interviews
Fete & Fight started with interviewing 15-20 families who married and held wedding ceremonies during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war. This resulted in exploring the aesthetics of these ceremonies influenced by wartime constraints. I later paired archival photos with current photos of their homes, accompanied by anecdotes I heard during the interviews.
Fragmented Echoes
Saedeh Doostbekheir
Print on wood, Video, and Pastel on Paper
My father had a habit of destroying family photos, a peculiar ritual to get rid of the weight/gaze of the past. It was his way of erasing the life he wished to forget, one he sought to forget ever existed. Perhaps, in choosing photography, I subconsciously sought to counteract my father's actions, to preserve and reconcile the fragments of the past that he tried to erase. I needed, and still need, to protect myself in a world where my traces in the past and the memories I once belonged to are fading away. By summoning and reconstructing these memories, I’ve engaged in a battle with my father, a battle where I reclaim our shared memories as my own.