I Saw a Woman, Pounding Light into Mortar

I Saw a Woman, Pounding Light into Mortar

I Saw a Woman, Pounding Light into Mortar brings together six Iranian-born women artists living and working across California whose practices are rooted in the experience of displacement, memory, and the enduring insistence on making something from what was meant to silence them.

The exhibition takes its title from a verse by Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980), one of Iran’s most beloved poets. In his poem Sound of Water’s Footsteps, Sepehri conjures an image at once domestic and impossible: a woman pounding light into mortar. Not receiving light, not reflecting it, transforming it into something that can be held, applied, passed on. That act of transformation is the curatorial heart of this exhibition.

California has long been a place of refuge for Iranians displaced by the Islamic Revolution of 1979, a rupture that did not end but continues, in new forms, to this day. California holds the largest Iranian diaspora community outside of Iran itself. The artists in this exhibition grew up under a system designed to suppress women’s voices and carried their practices, forged under that pressure, into the particular freedom and fracture of life here. Their work moves between painting, drawing, installation, sound sculpture, textile, video, and mirrors, tracing what is lost in displacement and what, against all odds, endures.

In Los Angeles, Ghazal Rahimi takes the geometric perfection of Persian pattern and shatters it — in paint and in clay — releasing what lives in the break: the liminality of existing between two countries, two languages, two selves. Shaghayegh Cyrous draws on myth, nature, and ritual, collapsing the ancient and contemporary into dreamlike environments. Her video installation Reenacting the Future holds twelve years of distance between a mother and daughter in a single frame, cedar-shaped screens standing as gates between presence and longing.

From the Bay Area, Narges Poursadeqi reassembles the past from its fragments into objects that hold memory the way the body holds grief. Her sound sculpture Between Dots of Blindness etches a poem by Hafez onto a paper reel played through a hand-cranked music box; to render Hafez in Braille is to insist on being read in the dark. Nasib Elahimehr works with mirrors and fabric, constructing suspended spatial installations where light, reflection, and movement become material memory, Persian craft traditions reborn as a living language. And Bsisters (Behnaz & Baharak Khaleghi) draw on Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and the figure of Zahāk to examine the consuming appetite for power, humor, and horror entwined, with beauty redefined on women’s own terms.

Together, these six artists hold what cannot easily be held: the joy of hard-won freedom and the ache of a homeland in crisis, the pride of a culture five thousand years deep, and the rage of watching it weaponized and suppressed. Their art does not ask for pity or resolution. It asks to be witnessed. It insists, as all enduring art insists, that light, even when it must be pounded into mortar by hand, will find its form.

Curator Bio
Katayoun Bahrami is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Los Angeles. Her practice focuses on the relationship between women’s bodies and the boundaries shaped by political and religious forces, examining how these conditions influence identity, visibility, and agency. Working across mixed media, installation, textiles, video, and photography, she explores the body as both subject and site of experience. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally, including at LoosenArt Gallery in Rome, the Broad Art Center in Los Angeles, the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, the Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards Exhibition at SOMArts Cultural Center and Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco, and the Surface Design Association Juried Exhibition in Newberg, Oregon. Bahrami earned her BFA from the University of Science and Culture in Iran in 2005, an MA in Arts and Cultural Management — Museum Studies from Michigan State University in 2017, an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2022, and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies in 2024.