Zelikha Zohra Shoja
To Those That Remained (2025)
Ink transfer on cotton percale and silk organza
Dimensions variable
Alcitepe-Çanakkale, Türkiye
A deconstructed film reel of scenes from Hilal-i Ahmer Çanakkale Şehitlik Hastane Müzesi, where the gruesome daily life of WWI fills the hospital. As part of ongoing research on gestural studies, the reel attempts to house a collective, fragmented body through the wax hands of the nurses, doctors, soldiers, and laymen in the museum. During the production process, a litter of kittens roamed around and slept in one of the re-enactment sheds showing visitors that these spaces and bodies that are frozen in a state of survival can become a home after all. The reel transforms the disrupted earth and built structures into a color palette and inhabits the body positions of the wax figures during wartime Alcitepe.
Please note: the fabrics are intended to be touched.
The Last Mother (2025)
Quilt, thread
Dimensions variable
Alcitepe-Çanakkale, Türkiye
The artist inverts a borrowed familial yorgan into an object for potential memory and mourning. With each new stitch representing a migration path, the yorgan is repurposed and compressed into an object ready to be carried, preserved, and stored away. The act of turning a precious textile, passed through three generations of women, into a commonplace item is a deliberate one. In reference to a common practice in Türkiye to the artist’s motherland of Afghanistan, in moments of abrupt displacement, people turn scarves, clothing, textiles into carriers.
Carriers of memory
Carriers of ancestral remembrance
Carriers of grief for what was lost and couldn’t be held.
In Afghan culture, when a person passes away, it is considered sawaab, or a good deed, to give away their items, with the exception of select dowry items, such as carpets and embroidery akin to a yorgan. With the loss of her grandparents before her birth, these items and practice of passing down did not reach the next generation. The carrier is prepared as an offering for those severed from their past and affected by war, inter-generational loss, and displacement.
gel benimle helva yap (“come make helva with me”) (2025)
Food performance
Alcitepe-Çanakkale, Türkiye
During the production process at EGEHUB x The Kirte School artist residency, Iran was being bombed by Israel. To navigate this liminal feeling of watching an active ruin, where Iranian civilian neighborhoods were being bombed, unfold in real time, and historic ruins being, or re-becoming, made safe by returnees to the village of Alcitepe, I felt a sense of anguish, but also unexpected hope. Hope that landscapes made uninhabitable can become habitable; that beyond the ruins, beyond the outward appearance of frail architecture, people still congregate to tell stories, eat, and grieve. To celebrate this history of returning and prevailing, I asked the villagers for assistance in preparing and eating funeral helva. To survive means to keep these rituals and foods that allow us to mourn.
The food performance was accompanied with a looped video where three participants filmed themselves cooking their own recipes of funeral halwa/helva using the staple three ingredients of flour, butter/oil, and sugar. Across different time zones, we stirred the same pot together.
Read to audience in Turkish:
“From Çanakkale to Gaza to Tehran to Kabul, we all feel how interconnected war and loss are. I made this helva as an act of mourning and invite you all to cook and eat with me. It’s a mutual practice between our cultures in Türkiye and Afghanistan to make this simple basic three-ingredient helva for funerals. We are connected in our rituals and in our grief.
I haven’t eaten or made halwa since October since my friend passed away. With this performance, I kept thinking that I didn’t fry dough in her house after she passed. I didn’t make halwa and felt guilty and incomplete in my grieving. I want to share this halva as a portal or carrier for you all. There is a saying I want to leave with you in Farsi:
دریا غم ساحلی ندارد “the river of grief has no shore”
It’s an honor to grieve and celebrate and be together with you all. Please take the pilaf, helva, and love with you.”
ARTIST STATEMENT
Two grandmothers walk to the park and decide to have a picnic. One lays her shawl on the ground; a passing neighbor brings a samovar. This is an institution.
As the daughter of immigrants from Afghanistan, I have experienced rootedness, history, and solidarity that have remained consistent in their precariousness, fragility, and conditionality. With a research background in migration studies, I collaborate with diasporic communities to produce ritualized gatherings, moving image works, and fabric photobooks that search for everyday networks of communal support.
The labor of those grandmothers, makeshift homes, makeshift kitchens, and makeshift carrier bags across borders are often dismissed as informal. Inspired by the Persian word for neighbor, همسایه / hāmsāya, which literally translates to “same shadow,” I directly refuse this notion of hierarchy in peoples, or neighbors. Informed by my own upbringing and community, who constitute one of the largest Afghan diasporas in the U.S. (Virginia), I explore collective practices of informal institution-making that form in response to displacement, instability, and rupture. Shaky structures, informal networks, and stuttering hybrid tongues need to be preserved. Within these spaces, I focus on documenting the exchange between bodies. Through repetition, juxtapositions, and gaps, I reveal tension, care, and grief between gestures that are sourced directly from communal archives. I trace these patterns onto fabric photobooks that can easily be folded and passed between people – a soft and ephemeral methodology rooted in inherited diasporic practices where even furniture is easily carried and stored away. When diasporic communities lack formal archives, the body becomes a living archive, carrying knowledge through gesture, myth, and memory. I channel this embodied knowledge through oral storytelling, which serves as a foundation in my film and video work.
By employing Boalian participatory theatre pedagogies, I subvert communal roles to invite the audience, participants, and myself to question our positions by asking: who is the guest and who is the host?
The neighbor is an alchemist. By bringing a samovar, she turned a sitting into a gathering, which transformed into a group mourning session. In working with diasporic communities, I aim to continue building mutual reciprocity and exchange practices of institution-making across borders.
