Raheleh Filsoofi is an itinerant artist, feminist curator, and community advocate. Using clay and sound as her primary expressive mediums, her work revolves around themes of movement, immigration, and social activism. Her art disrupts the borders that exist between us and seeks a more inclusive world, illuminating and challenging policies and politics. 

 At the Edge of Arrival brings together a constellation of works—dust paintings, vessels, sound, and video—to explore migration, land, and memory from the perspective of a Middle Eastern immigrant woman living in the American South. In this exhibition, Filsoofi engages with the layered histories of place, the materials drawn from it, and a poetic dialogue between her own migration from Iran and the forced migration of enslaved Africans who arrived in Charleston. Through this lens, she reflects on our shared presence in the land—not through similarity, but through resonance across time, material, and memory. 

Having lived and worked across nine Southern states over the last twenty years, Filsoofi’s experience informs her exploration of geography not only as a physical landscape but as a layered archive of labor, displacement, and survival. This exhibition is a poetic excavation, a mapping of arrival and absence, a listening for the sounds that persist in soil. It honors the people, plants, and stories rooted in this region, while asking: What connects us across difference? What remains at the edge of arrival?