This piece originally appeared in ZAMAN, an arts & media collective dedicated to the remembrance, preservation, and re-evaluation of Mizrahi cultural consciousness.
This series of graphite illustrations on paper combines images and text from a wide range of sources to pose and address the question: “what does it feel like to remember a place you have never been?”
As an American-born descendant of Persian Jews barred from entering Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Levy incorporates images and words drawn from family photos, state-issued documents, Persian ketubbot (Jewish marriage contracts), post-revolutionary Iranian photography, album covers, and visual representations of memories her family has recalled over the years.
The illustrations serve to walk the line between legitimate forms of recollection and fabrications of a cultural imaginary. Levy negotiates how attempting to immerse oneself in a visual landscape accessible only through secondhand images (rather than firsthand sight) can both toy with and clarify her perception of Jewish life in Iran from a diasporic standpoint.
* yadet miad / یادت میاد translates to ‘do you remember?’
Sophie Levy is a student at Barnard College of Columbia University concentrating in Visual Arts, Middle East Studies, and Jewish Studies. Her work in painting examines the complexity of sociocultural life in modern Persian Jewish communities, often focusing on how gender can be performed differently in private vs. public spheres. In both art and writing, Sophie’s work explores what it means to “remember” a homeland that remains inaccessible to many people in her generation.
