чайни набор – Setting a table to meet my ancestors

чайни набор (tea set) is an installation which delves into the tapestry of my family’s heritage and personal stories through a Deleuzian perspective on time, memory as plateaus, a rhizomatic space for this work to form.

Чайни набор (chaynyy nabor) is an installation work featuring two large vessels, armoudi (a traditional tea form from Azerbaijan, my family’s place of origin), a drawing of a backgammon board, a torn porcelain tile, and a variety of other distinctive elements.

These personal symbols evoke a rich sensory experience, inviting audiences to come closer to the work and explore its crevices, smells, orifices, and pores.

Porosity is an essential conceptual matter; the rough ceramic surface of the oversized and distorted armoudi, covered by graphite drawings and sealed with beeswax, comment on memory’s ephemerality and temporary nature. The work has been bisqued but not fired to completion, which would evaporate the drawings. The non-vitrous nature of this clay body, its ostioles, implies things are ready to permeate and bubble to the surface. Mimicking bone and stone, which sign immutability yet remain malleable and permutable. Through this concept, I inspect family histories, making visible what is known, evolving a grieving ritual for what’s obscured or lost.  

A tasbeh, safety pins with torn black fabric attached, crushed walnuts, black tea spilling across the drawing, and garlic cloves. A prayer to the unknown ancestors, a wedding gift, an enshrinement, a letter, and people reunited.

Scattered throughout the work are things that fall away from the viewer’s understanding and gaze, getting lost in over-saturation – like that which falls away the more I climb into this research.

Inspired by works such as Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995, dir. Hideaki Anno) and Arrival (2016, dir. Denis Villeneuve), as well as artists such as Hilma af Klint and Smonath Bhatt and writings from Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, Anzaldua and Glissant. Travelling alongside similar lines of temporal misalignments, cultural queering, and spiritual exploration, I am conversing with a growing material and theoretical research repertoire. Deleuze and Guattari challenge us to question the entanglement and construction of our reality and experience of it, while writers such as Anzaldua and Glissant blur borders and concepts of knowing and navigation. I look to artists who create vast mythological realms from our shared human experience and refine these experiences into more-than-human potentials. Most inspirationally, I am talking to my mom over tea.

Reflecting on Glissant’s use of opacity and a schizoanalytic perspective on the self, the work uses the desire for knowledge to probe and accept what is absent or obscured, helping me navigate grief while finding joyful entanglements and multiplicities in what is both known and unknown. As a series of mappings – objects that merge my personal process of tracing ancestry with materials which fix these ideas – I investigate how ancestry extends beyond what I can grasp. These objects unfold as a narrative resisting linearity. The map explodes chronology; to borrow from the terminology of Karen Barad in What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, VIrtuality, Justice – Was ist das MaB des M’chts? Unendlichkeit, Vlitualitat, Gerech tigkeit, the work is a composite of many subjects whose intra-actions create an endless emergence of new figures and an endless transformation of the subjects themselves.

These works seek to tap into an intuitive sense of self, depicting forms that feel like openings to an archive of memory and kinship.

Embracing impermanence and non-traditional lineage I renew a sense of relation to these heritages and familial lineages through materials and geographies. The process of drawing, sculpting and studying is slow. Hours spent rendering, researching, and conversing mirror an invitation to delay a conclusion to the work and engage with its interconnected nature. In a world that demands constant presence, taking the time to linger in these spaces feels like both a privilege and a necessity.

The conversations I’ve had over time with my mom and other family members have built upon each other, weaving stories that may not always be visible to the viewer.

Each object in the installation holds a part of this narrative, and the relational positioning of these objects on the table creates a dialogue between them. They resonate and harmonize with one another, merging their histories. This intentional arrangement over-saturating the space invites viewers to consider how familial relationships and histories are built and preserved, reflecting the complexity of memory and heritage.

As a teacher, imagining my work as pedagogy to share with others comes hand in hand with doing the work. I envision guiding participants through a nonlinear mapping process of the stories they know about their families. Like myself, they select objects and symbols that resonate with their experiences, layering these elements in a drawing where care is taken to represent each one. Carefully rendering helps explore connections between different possibilities of recording a story. Connected to this process would be writing epistolary delineations and crafting letters addressed to past ancestors and future kin. My work embodies this epistolary approach, as it reflects on the stories that emerge from the intra-actions within the installation, creating a bridge connecting the past with the future. My work is meant for my past, present, and future ancestors – known and unknown.

I look forward to the future transformation of this work as it evolves into a storehouse of my family’s memories and heritage.