Language as Surrogate for Home: The Material Afterlife of Persian Script in Iranian Diasporic Art

This essay examines the aesthetics of language in the art practices of three Iranian diasporic artists—Parastou Forouhar, Golnar Adili, and Saba Sharifi. In particular, I am concerned with the ways in which they reconfigure Persian script as a site of affective, sensual, and embodied experiences of loss, displacement, and memory of home. Drawing on Joseph Roach’s notion of surrogation, I explore how these artists use language aesthetically to reimagine experiences of displacement, loss, and memories of home. In Forouhar’s Written Room, the walls and floor of the gallery are covered with illegible Persian script in a way that create an embodied, spatial experience of disorientation. In Language Landscape, Adili separates a single letter from her late father’s handwriting and reconfigures it into a material archive of loss and grief. In A Cup of Tea, Sharifi’s snippets of her conversations with others in Persian while drinking tea are printed on ceramic tiles to create sensory experiences of home through the rituals of everyday life. In foregrounding the aesthetic practices of these Iranian artists, this essay aims to draw attention to alternative modes of knowledge production that often remain unnoticed or unspoken in diasporic art and the broader field of diaspora studies and contributes to critical scholarship on migration, diasporic art, and material culture.