Raheleh Filsoofi, a collector of soil and sound, is an itinerant artist, feminist curator, and community advocate. 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 performances. Her art disrupts the borders that exist between us and seeks a more inclusive world, illuminating and challenging policies and politics.
Raheleh is the 2023 recipient of Joan Mitchell Fellowship, 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 MFA in Fine Arts from Florida Atlantic University and a BFA in Ceramics from Al-Zahra University in Tehran, Iran.
Over the past decade, she has traversed across continents, navigated between cultures, and observed the effects of political and social stagnation and extremism associated with immigration policies and social injustice. As an Iranian-American woman, her own experience as an immigrant has deeply influenced her artistic philosophy and she is driven to produce work that challenges current perspectives on politics, society, nature, and culture. To achieve this goal, she experiments with different aesthetic strategies and incorporates various media and materials with wide-ranging applications.
Her multimedia installations and performances provide layered, multi-dimensional experiences aimed at reimagining a world in which the divisions between places and cultures collapse, coalesce, and invite the viewer to journey physically and psychically beyond their territorial entrapments.
At the Edge of Arrival: Held Together by Dust
by Katie McCampbell Hirsch
In Raheleh Filsoofi: At the Edge of Arrival, material becomes memory, and geography becomes a layered tapestry of lived experience, migration, and the echoes of histories that continue to shape the present. Raheleh Filsoofi presents for us a body of work—comprising dust paintings, clay vessels, sound, and video—to offer a meditation on the intersections of land, displacement, and belonging through the eyes and hands of an Iranian immigrant woman navigating the complexity of the American South.
Filsoofi’s work has long used this integrated approach, crafting installations that bring together a variety of materials to tell collective stories, which include her own. For Filsoofi, clay is both medium and metaphor. Filsoofi digs clay from specific sites, where the very place of material in her new dust paintings, which stretch the limits of what it means to work with clay. In this work, Filsoofi uses the very essence of clay, raw in its powdered form. Dust, that most ephemeral of materials, becomes in Filsoofi’s hands an invitation to consider how meaning can emerge not only from what is built up, but also from what is barely held together.
This engagement with one place, one thing—clay—in many forms underscores Filsoofi’s broader questions: What does it mean to arrive in a place shaped by others’ displacement? How do we hold space for histories not our own, even as we make a life within them? Filsoofi’s own experience of migration from Iran to the United States is here in reflective dialogue with the forced migration of enslaved Africans who arrived in the port of experiences, but rather evokes a resonant filed where histories of movement—marked by different agencies, traumas, and displacements—vibrate against each other across time and space. Through this resonance, she asks: What remains at the edge of arrival? What lingers in the soil, waiting to be heard?
Sound becomes a vehicle for this listening. In her audio and video work, Filsoofi renders the land not as silent backdrop, but as an active, sonic archive alive with the textures of wind, water, and human experience. In this spirit of immersion, Filsoofi created a book of dust poetry, inspired by the exhibition’s location adjacent to the Halsey Institute Library. Books are another vessel of memory, language, and reflection. Through poetry, Filsoofi gives voice to otherwise unspeakable threads of thought. This idea carries through her ceramic vessels, which honor the legacy of David Drake (Dave the Potter), an enslaved African American artisan and lived and worked in Edgefield, South Carolina. Drake’s inscribed pots wove resistance into utility and embody the radical potential of clay as both record and refusal, objects that speak even under conditions designed to silence. In using clay as legacy, Filsoofi asks the land to tell its story—her story, our story, the stories of all of those who moved across it.
The American South, in all its contradictions, is both site and subject. Having lived and worked across nine Southern states over the past two decades, Filsoofi brings to the region neither romanticization nor condemnation. Instead, she approaches it as a layered archive: a place where histories of labor, land, and resistance coexist with present-day complexities. The story of a place is not linear but made of wheels of time that turn with and against each other. At the Edge of Arrival asks us to look and listen to these wheels, to the testimony embedded in the ground beneath our feet.
Ultimately, this exhibition is an offering: an invitation to consider how we engage with the histories that shape the spaces we inhabit. We are reminded that arrival is never a singular event, but a process—ongoing, unstable, always becoming. In a land shaped by arrivals, forced and free we inherit this place and its stories. Here, Raheleh Filsoofi reminds us that to arrive is not to conclude.
Katie McCampbell Hirsch is Deputy Director of Exhibitions at the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia. She was previously Director and Chief Curator at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Senior Curator at island6 in Shanghai, China. She has organized exhibitions featuring the work of artists like Demond Melancon, Dyani White Hawk, Kukuli Velarde, La Vaughn Belle, and Delphine Diallo. Hirsch earned a BA in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MA in Art History, Visual Cultures of the Americas from The Florida State University.
