Aqsa Arif

Selected by Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland

Along 'On the edge of the canvas' a woman’s body moves within the confines of stratified stone walls, spaces that evoke silence, isolation, and a concealed past. Her movement slips through layers of history, experiencing the memory of this place like a silent witness. Although her body appears small and vulnerable against these structures, her presence renders this history newly visible and tangible.

Her movement continues toward the refined stone stairways of a building that has repeatedly shifted its function over time, from a site of chemical production for war, to a military based, and eventually to a university and library. Its transformations narrate the persistence of power, power that changes form but does not disappear, power that survives by reshaping itself. Through her body, the woman draws the viewer into reading these layered narratives, urging us to consider what becomes visible and what remains hidden.

The woman’s body is simultaneously victim and narrator; it is both seen and seeing. The stone walls and the woman’s body, in their tension, arrive at a shared language. In the final moments of the film, the woman’s disappearance and the building’s continued presence before the lens reveal the culmination of this tension and its concealed dialogue, the erasure of the living body and the fixation of the stone archive. It is as if the moving narrative falls silent, and the stone wall, now the dominant memory, takes its place. What was once embodied and concrete becomes internal and abstract. This absence becomes the very sign of the narrative’s endurance.

Razieh Akbari has engaged with stone in her previous video works as well. In The Lost Bird, stone appears as a symbol of violence; in Hopscotch, she references a childhood game she once played. In Afghanistan, this game is common among young girls. In it, a girl’s mastery over her body and mind mirrors her mastery over the stone and its trajectory. She must learn this control through practice. The stone repeatedly strikes her foot until she acquires the skill to direct her movements precisely, ensuring the stone lands where it should. As Akbari notes, this game is endless.

Razieh Akbari is an emerging young artist working in the field of contemporary art and is currently continuing her studies at HfG Offenbach.