The memories of endless dictionary

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.

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