Raheleh Filsoofi
The Excerpts of Earth
August 11 – September 22, 2024
The Excerpts of Earth is a sensory dialogue between the artist and the earth, articulated through clay, sound, and poetry. It challenges the narratives of exploitation by promoting exploration as a means to understand our world.
The ceramic vessels in the exhibition are created from clay gathered at various locations in Nashville, where the artist is based. The accompanying sounds, collected from her travels from home to Franconia and during her residency, are played alongside her recited poems, creating an auditory map of her journeys.
Raheleh Filsoofi, a collector of soil and sound, is an itinerant artist and feminist curator. Her work revolves around themes of movement, immigration, and social activism. Clay and sound serve as her primary expressive mediums, enabling her to create diverse narratives through multimedia installations and immersive sound performances. Her art disrupts the borders that exist between us and seeks a more inclusive world, illuminating and challenging policies and politics.
Her current and recent exhibitions include Imagined Boundaries, an interactive multimedia installation at Gibbes Museum in Charleston, SC (2023-2024), and Only Sound Remains, an interactive multimedia installation at the Sharjah Biennial 15, Thinking Historically in the Present in Sharjah, UAE (2023).
Raheleh is the 2023 recipient of Joan Mitchell Fellowship award, the 2022 Winner of the 1858 Contemporary Southern Art Award and the recipient of the 2021 Southern Prize Tennessee State Fellowship. She is an Assistant Professor of Ceramics in the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University and holds the secondary appointment at the Blair School of Music. She received her M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Florida Atlantic University and a B.F.A. in Ceramics from Al-Zahra University in Tehran, Iran.