In the Soup

Excerpt from companion essay for Zahra Komeylian’s “Red Soup” (2024).

Zahra’s exhibition, and the full essay, can be seen and read here. 

“The soup’s red is sanguine, the what is that is not always seen. Red hides in the boundary between the visible and invisible. Seeing red is what draws us in, what lights us up. The red has been associated with the devil, because it is what tempts us into the world, ready to catch fire over anything. Red can overwhelm, and yet there is a sensitivity in red, as when blood rushes to the skin to produce inflammation, the wound that heals.

“Komeylian asks us to know the red intimately, to take it in through the mouth. While the image is the instinct, words offer us discernment and distinction, like teeth that grind down at what is already whole. Writing about Red Soup, a series of drawings that displays the treasure of one woman’s descent into the Underworld, has a similar task. Our analysis attempts to take unity and find the many elements that formed it.

“In Red Soup, stark black lines give us some solidity. Where the black collects we find the lead, and what it is that calls for dying – the violating parts of Psyche. The Saturnine Father is always heavy, on his back, and the gravity of what he carries rarely allows him to sit upright. The absence of an equal opposite that could offer protection is visible in vast amounts of white space, which becomes a container for the work. Here is the what is: in Red Soup we find a profound separation from something vital, the grief of its loss, and the longing for reunion, a conjunction of opposites.

“The myth of Inanna-Ishtar, an ancient Sumerian Goddess of Love, the Queen of Heaven herself, shows us how to die, and to be reborn carrying a sword in our right hand, and a chalice in our left. When Inanna’s sister, Ereshkigal – Queen of the Underworld – is in mourning over her husband’s death, Inanna descends into her sister’s territory to mourn with her. There are seven gates that guard the Underworld, and each requires the removal of a veil. Stripping down, Inanna is forced to part with aspects of herself that will not serve her at her destination. But nothing she’s known will serve her in the Underworld, and Ereshkigal murders Inanna with eyes of fury, placing her corpse on a hook. A journey to the Underworld requires just this dosage of the sanguine, the red that carries us toward lost parts of ourselves – and necessarily at a cost.”