The Artifact Room
The Dream Room
*The Rod and The Ring
The conjoined rod and ring is a recurring emblem/object in Mesopotamian art that is exclusively held by deities. It appears in various artifacts spanning millennia and archeologists are still debating what it could signify. I explored the rod and the ring's symbolism in my interdisciplinary thesis exhibit "Remember the Future: Oneiric Artifacts from Mesopotamia".
Artist Statement
Dream recall and archeology share many parallels: Both are memory practices that require speculation, interpretation and re-membering disconnected elements to form a coherent narrative. Both also require a negotiation, sometimes even confrontation, with our perception of time. With this in mind, this exhibit proposes a speculative form of archeology that uses dreaming as a methodology to excavate possible futures.
I grounded my thesis research in the notion that history moves in cycles by referring to Iraq's vast archeological record of Iraq, where civilization as we know it began.The earliest evidence of writing emerges in southern Mesopotamia around 3500BC, providing us with texts that span millennia, covering everything from beer recipes and epic poems to their own oneiric epistemology. Most of this was set in clay, buried in the ground for us to discover thousands of years later. Even in their historical accounts, Mesopotamian people would encounter ruins and clay artifacts from previous eras, which they regarded as divine interventions from the past.
The future would also intercede with their present through their development of oneiromancy, or dream divination - vessels of possibility that guided the ancients to what lied ahead. Time travel, in this sense, was real for the ancients. The film “The Rod and The Ring” explores the concurrence of timelines that dreams could transport us to, centering around the mysterious Mesopotamian rod and ring.
Circling back to the idea of history repeating: The universal flood myth originates in Mesopotamian literature like the Epic of Gilgamesh, which hints at a prehistoric civilization erased by divinely decreed deluge. What if something like that were to happen again in the future? How would a society forced to start over manifest? Through cinema and ceramics, this exhibit invites you to explore artifacts from a distant future that’s retrieved lost wisdom from the ancient past.
Remember The Future: Oneiric Artifacts from Mesopotamia was exhibited at the Grad Gallery (OCAD University) June 6-12, 2024.