No Body's Body

The multi channel sound installation was made in collaboration with Manuel Phil. Bischof. Hoda Siahtiri portrays the body, a body, her body of loss, as a site of archiving and transmission.

The space holds a series of life-size photographs and a sound composition that convey the patterns and rhythms of lamentation. Laments often accompany the process of mourning with music, song and poetry. No Body's Body is a reflection and an embodiment of mourning in the form of a Lament, where individual and collective memories come together in a practice of healing.

Hoda's own body is part of her research. In a series of photographic portraits, she poses in various outfits illustrating different phases in a person's life and in the unfolding of historical periods. The pictures blend with the uncanny atmosphere created by an immersive soundscape that represents 'the song of the mothers'. It is a collection of sounds that draws on the tonalities of earth, water, minerals, alongside recordings of lamentations sung by Bakhtiari women.

By wearing these traces of the past and using personal sound recordings, the artist becomes herself a living archive and a body of transmission. She performs a practice of 'auto-ethnography,' claiming the codes of ethnography – a discipline that has a tradition of patronising or labelling persons and communities as exotic – to tell her own story.

Thus, No Body's Body invites us to enter a layered bodyscape of loss, healing and memory.