Sara Rahanjam’s Silent Poultry presents a series of surreal sculptures that bring together the languages of the body, ornament, and silence. Each work features a pair of vividly colored lips, cast in fiberglass, from which bronze legs emerge forming an uncanny hybrid that balances allure with unease. The forms extend Rahanjam’s ongoing interest in fragmented bodies, confronting the ways women have historically been reduced to isolated, sexualized parts within dominant visual culture.

The lips function as a charged threshold: the site where speech begins but may also be restrained. From this opening, the bronze legs introduce movement and consequence, suggesting the trajectory of words once they leave the body—their ability to travel, provoke, transform, or be suppressed. Through this surreal gesture, Rahanjam materializes the relationship between voice and action, expression and control.

The sculptures are adorned with gul-u-morḡ, the traditional Persian bird-and-flower motif associated with finely detailed depictions of blossoms, birds, and other natural forms. Prominent in Persian decorative arts from the 17th century onward and widely circulated during the Zand Dynasty (c. 1750–1779), the motif historically symbolized the relationship between lover and beloved, with the rose representing beauty and the bird the human spirit. By applying this ornamental language to contemporary sculptural forms, Rahanjam bridges Iran’s visual heritage with present-day concerns.

Silent Poultry emerges within a broader climate of political urgency shaped in part by the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, where questions of voice, bodily autonomy, and visibility have taken on renewed significance. Without illustrating these events directly, Rahanjam’s sculptures resonate with the complexities of speaking and being heard under conditions where expression can carry profound personal and collective consequences. Oscillating between elegance and absurdity, intimacy and estrangement, the works invite viewers to consider whether the forms they encounter signal emergence, metamorphosis, or silencing. In Rahanjam’s hands, the act of speech becomes sculptural—at once fragile and forceful, intimate and public