Ritual Series

Three videos playing on a loop, parallel to each other on the East and West walls of the gallery. The sounds of grains, coins, and grinding rocks, with a distant voice of my family members is echoing throughout the room. On the West wall, there is a screen playing a video of my hands counting and rolling pennies on a plain, white, background.  On the East wall, there are two screens next to each other. One is a video of my cousin’s hands cleaning rice, and the other, a video of my grandmother and my aunt’s hands grinding grains on a traditional hand mill made of two large stones. By installing the screens parallel to each other in the gallery, I am aiming to convey my experience in between worlds; The rituals seen in these videos cannot be experienced together in one place. The practices I particularly remember as a little girl in Iran was participating in daily or weekly rituals with the women in my family such as cleaning rice. The movement of my hands against the rice, the attention to detail, and the happiness of knowing that my technique may be as good as my grandmother’s, is a physical memory that felt lost when I moved to America. In America, the weekly ritual for my family and I was to count pennies from the store and wrap them before deposit day. In Rituals 1, the pennies are placed in a half circle, almost crescent shape that resembles the patterns created on the rice while they are being cleaned. Meanwhile my hands mimic the gestures from my cousin’s hands in Rituals 2. This gesture not only presents the contrast in rituals, it also brings a narrative of acceptance of memories in a new environment.