Sara Jajou - Apparitions

Apparitions

2025

Sara Jajou

Installation support: Duncan Freedman

Video projection, light, fan and veil installation

Dimensions variable

This is my graduate work for my Bachelor of Art (Fine Arts) at RMIT, melbourne.

Sara Jajou, Apparitions (2025), video projection, light, fan and veil installation, dimensions variable.

Installation documentation.

Apparitions is a provocation of the Western colonial gaze and the construction of the Other. In the words of Daniel Neugebauer in Counter Readings of the Body, ‘the gaze…appears as an adversary, a knife, the evil eye…’. The work challenges the claim to knowledge made by the Western gaze which reads and marks bodies as savage, sexual, racial, animalistic, queer, grotesque, Oriental and ultimately dangerous. As a contentious motif, the veil emerges as a source of anxiety and fear for the West, and simultaneously a mythologising, sexualised fantasy of exposure. Hidden from the gaze, the feminine 'Middle Eastern body' must be made visible. In this context, to gaze is to dominate. For hundreds of years, the Western empires have proliferated the gaze to render the Other’s body, and by extension the Other’s homeland, into a site justifiable of political intervention.

In a moment of agency, the performer in Apparitions wears a textile mask made in likeness to the Lion of Tell Harmal (1800 B.C), an artefact that was destroyed during the 2003 looting of the Iraq National Museum under U.S occupation. With reference to the impunity of the West’s war crimes, the lion is reanimated through the moving body and returns as a haunting of the Western institution.

Sara Jajou, Apparitions (2025), video projection, light, fan and veil installation, dimensions variable. Video still.

Sara Jajou, Apparitions (2025), video projection, light, fan and veil installation, dimensions variable.