Recent Projects

Sara Jajou, Sera, 2026, cotton, 500 x 500mm, photo: Sara Jajou.

Sara Jajou, Asmar Benyamen Oraha, 2026, cotton, 470 x 460mm, photo: Sara Jajou.

Shimane ‘d Bakhtathe (Names of Women) (2026)

Sara Jajou, Sera, 2026, cotton, 500 x 500mm, photo: Sara Jajou.

Shimane ‘d Bakthathe (meaning names of women) is an ongoing series of crocheted cotton tapestries, each embedded with the name of a woman in my lineage. It is a slow archive honouring the Assyrian women in my lineage by remembering and knowing their names. Often, women are remembered for their maternal roles in the family, and called ‘mother, daughter, grandmother…’ etc. In the process, their names become lost. These tapestries emerge non-chronologically as I learn how to write their names in my mother-tongue, Assyrian, and take form in what I consider to be my Dada’s medium, filet crochet.

Dada, my grandmother Asmar, learned how to crochet and knit at a young age in her hometown Alqosh, in Bet Nahrain. Despite Alqosh being an ancient town, I only recently learned that our family has only lived there for 5 generations after escaping the Armenian, Assyrian, Greek and Yezidi Genocide (1915-1923) by the Ottoman Empire. Dada tells me the story of her great-great-grandmother, also named Asmar, who fled from her Assyrian village in Turkey to Alqosh, while her relatives resettled and named the Assyrian village now known as Sharafiya. Asmar’s baby sister, only a few days old, was left behind in a woven reed basket - both her life and name unknown.

Read more about this ongoing work in Garland Magazine.

My calluses are soft and tender (2024)

An Assyrian party in Melbourne from family archives, 1999. Photographer unknown.

“The women have always danced until their skin gives out. Barefoot, my aunties lay their heels down for the final song. Their shoes rest under the table with the unclaimed tights someone has taken off. Its flesh belongs to another body of overtax and overburden and oversweat. My cousin will pick it up at the end of the night and laugh about the size of it. But, dancing to gubare requires an unweaving of the body in order to move fast enough. Heels should be nowhere in sight amidst the disarming of plastic-sprayed hair and missing wedding rings, as well as foundation, in a shade far too orange for my cousin, melting onto the timber floor. I should’ve taken my shoes off but I was a timid child. Shirts untuck and faces flush, my uncle grows tired and I don’t remember if my mother was dancing. I cannot remember if she was invited. All I can know for certain is the sensation of my thighs chafing out of sync with the beat, and toes slipping out of my mother’s heels.”

Jajou, S. (2024) ‘My calluses are soft and tender’ in Refai. N (ed.) Sabaar 18.3. Melbourne: un Magazine.

Read here.

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