Tina Rouhandeh: Inquiry about Forgotten Birds

How can we excavate and preserve the untold narratives of a people when those very narratives are at risk of erasure? In what ways do traditional crafts embody the immaterial layers of history? What is at stake when we attempt to leave a physical trace of that which is intangible? Working across calligraphy, hand-stitching, and weaving, Tina Rouhandeh’s practice reflects on loss and absence, and the ways in which they can (or cannot) be articulated and materialized.

Rouhandeh was born and raised in Iran, and at the age of 18, trained in Persian calligraphy in Tehran—one of the few artforms that she could study as a member of Bahá’í faith in the country. Dating as far back as the 7th century, calligraphy gradually transformed from a documentation tool into an artform in its own right. Calligraphers created styles and patterns of writing that extended beyond the page itself and onto architecture, pottery, and metal work. Crucially, scribes were tasked with using their craft to keep a record of their time, copying history books and governmental records as well as manuscripts.

In order to rule the pages of their manuscripts, scribes are known to use a mastar—a set of cotton strings stretched over a frame, which produces a written area with a specific set of lines on the page. Drawing on the functionality of mastar in calligraphy, and on the role of scribe-calligraphers as keepers of history, Rouhandeh creates pieces that weave together both words and threads, producing hybrid works that unearth stories of persecution in Iran. Mounted on black canvas, each one of these works amplifies the stories of those whose voices have been forcibly silenced and erased, be it prisoners, people of the Bahá’í faith, Iranian youth, and women, whose most basic rights have been violated for decades. Rouhandeh has been working on the series Inquiry about Forgotten Birds for the past five years; her work is a testament to the continued urgency of speaking up against human rights violations in Iran.

Tina Rouhandeh’s work is a labor of time. Each of the works presented here is made up of nearly 3,500 bullion stitches. A single one of these hand stitches—created by twisting a thread around a needle several times, and then inserting it into the fabric—takes about twenty minutes to complete. Weaving, stitching, and calligraphing for more than twelve hours a day—often working for up to fifteen hours—it can take Tina seven months to complete one work. Arduous and demanding, this durational process requires remarkable endurance and patience, preserving not only the art of calligraphy, but the countless stories of those being persecuted in Iran today.