Interview with Sara Rajaei
Video works by the Iranian-Dutch artist Sara Rajaei have the silence that Simon & Garfunkel
wrote about, within which people talked wordlessly and wrote poems never shared by voices.
It is the full silence that has deposited all the sounds in the world, which has settled down in
the throbing sound of our heartbeat but still, most of the time, being choked by other
vibrations, we can’t hear it...
Rajaei’s work truly evokes countless references since it reminds us of the primordial element
that we have sometimes and somewhere sensed. It invokes Barthes who writes about the
endless dictionary from which every new author retrieves existing texts to create a new one.
Artists are like shamans, through their work they evoke images, sounds and sentences
inscribed somewhere at some point in time or pronounced somewhere at this very moment...
And this very act of evoking makes the artist original, close to the origins... This calls for
another citation: ...I saw the circulation of my dark blood, I saw love connecting and death
changing, I saw the earth in Alef, I saw my face and intestine, I saw your face, I felt dizzy and
cried because my eyes saw that secret and presumed object, whose name is usurped by people
although no one has seen it: the unfathomable universe.
Iranian poetess reminiscing about her life in Rajaei’s documentary Shahrzad (2009) can also
be easily related to Borges’s words. Looking at the Sun makes you feel safe. As if the Sun
passes some of its memories on to you… since the beginning of all times. Because at the
beginning there was only the Sun..., says Shahrzad Beheshti Mirmiran watching this star,
round in shape like Alef... Retrieved from the endless dictionary, video art by Sara Rajaei is
also round, it has neither the beginning nor the end and does not belong to any particular
period in time. It is about everyone else, it can be talked about through all the others, however,
it is communicated through the artist’s innermost feelings about her own memories.