Sara Jajou

is an Assyrian-Chaldean artist working at the intersection of contemporary histories and ancient futures. 


Publications
Exhibitions
CV
About
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Selected Works
  1. Shimane ‘d Bakhtathe 
  2. Apparitions
  3. I like to be a girl with fur
  4. (My mother's song) أغنية أمي
  5. I met my lover barefoot
  6. My Jidu tells good stories
  7. English-Sureth Dictionary
Apparitions (2025)
Sara Jajou, Apparitions, 2025, video projection, light, fan and veil installation, dimensions variable, photo: Sara Jajou
Sara Jajou, Apparitions, 2025, video projection, light, fan and veil installation, dimensions variable, photo: Sara Jajou

 In the words of Daniel Neugebauer in Counter Readings of the Body, ‘the gaze…appears as an adversary, a knife, the evil eye…’.
Apparitions is a provocation of the Western colonial gaze and construction of the Other. The work responds to the claim to knowledge made by the Western gaze which reads and marks bodies as savage, sexual, racial, animalistic, queer, grotesque, Oriental and ultimately dangerous. As a contentious motif, the veil emerges as a source of anxiety and fear for the West, and simultaneously a mythologising, sexualised fantasy of exposure. Hidden from the gaze, the feminine 'Middle Eastern body' must be made visible. In this context, to gaze is to dominate. For hundreds of years, the Western empires have proliferated the gaze to render the Other’s body, and by extension the Other’s homeland, into a site justifiable of political intervention.

In a moment of agency, the performer in Apparitions wears a textile mask made in likeness to the Lion of Tell Harmal (1800 B.C), an artefact that was destroyed during the 2003 looting of the Iraq National Museum under U.S occupation. With reference to the impunity of the West’s war crimes, the lion is reanimated through the moving body and returns as a haunting of the Western institution.

Video documentation can be accessed at the bottom of this page.