https://saminasiraj.cargo.site/work 2026-04-24T23:48:37+00:00 always 0.5 https://saminasiraj.cargo.site/work-in-progress-1 2026-04-25T22:41:02+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/W2521666042756954038154770971503/c.png <div style="text-align: left"><span style="color: rgba(3, 3, 3, 0.85); --font-scale: 1.2;">The accidental unearthing of a 4,500-year-old goddess head, Anat, occurred a year before the genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza in 2023. The serpent-crowned Canaanite goddess of love and war consolidated a moment in which ancestral presence emerged through the intelligence of nonhuman forces and chose its witness. For Palestinians, identity is rooted in reciprocity with the terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial worlds, all of which are woven through relations of kinship between human and nonhuman life. Under occupation, these environmental systems are systematically weaponized: ancestral olive groves are uprooted, farmlands are polluted, homes are demolished, and access to clean water is severely restricted. Meanwhile, Gaza’s coastal culture exists under the shadow of a heavily militarized sea. “The real danger comes from the skies.” An <a href="https://www.trtworld.com/article/18182759" target="_blank">article published on July 11, 2024</a>, documenting 9 months into the genocide, shows this effectively: “The bombs have contaminated the soil. You can see it in the pictures, the land is burnt and black. It’s not a comfortable habitat for scorpions or snakes. The war has affected all living creatures, all signs of life, most of the land, the stones,” said Imad Atrash, executive director at Palestinian Wildlife Society in the West Bank. In this necropolitical landscape, specifically in Gaza, settler colonialism has violently restructured local ecosystems and disrupted native relationships to land and water.<br /><br />Anat’s reemergence becomes an act of anticipatory readiness. Walter Benjamin’s notion of history “flashing up at a moment of danger” offers a framework for understanding this temporal opening: a fragment of the past asserting itself precisely when the threat of erasure is most acute. Here, ecological, symbolic, and material forces organize in ways that defy human orchestration. Nonhuman materiality intervenes as an autonomous agent, testifying to memory, truth, and justice. Outside the gaze of occupation, institutional authority, state excavation, or curatorial mediation, serpent symbolism, deeply rooted in Ancient Palestine, coils upward on an ordinary day, choosing to be witnessed by a Gazan farmer plowing the land. The land, as a sentient, legal, and political being, holds a geological record of extraction, conquest, empire, and oppression.  <br /><br /> Anat isn’t alone in this discovery either. Decades before, the famous Corfu Medusa pediment was also discovered by farmers.  It is a reminder that the ancestors and ecology are ethical interlocutors that recognize harm and generosity, and choose to be discovered by those deeply connected to the soil and rooted in the land. It shows that even when human systems deny justice, the land works in obscure and mysterious ways to restore balance.</span></div><br /> <div style="text-align: center"></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/B2526256692993883483224166562671/se-7.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/F2594947505178172582867249068911/1.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/X2594947505215066071014668172143/2.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/D2594956011027205202562627861359/photos-estate-2.jpg <span style="color: rgba(8, 8, 8, 0.85); --font-scale: 1.2;"> In Greece and Armenia, the snake lives quietly in the corners of the house. It is fed with milk to ward off harm and serves as an ancestral guardian spirit. In Albania and Kosovo, as seen previously, it coils above arches and thresholds. Similarly, it takes me back to Pompeii, where snake altars (<i>lararia</i>) were often placed in kitchens or courtyards because these were the heart of domestic life. The snake represented the household’s guardian spirit, tied to fertility, abundance, and protection. Families made daily offerings—like food or wine—to keep the house prosperous and safe. These shrines were woven into everyday rituals around cooking and family life. These findings support the serpent as a threshold keeper, a bridge between the domestic and spiritual worlds, as well as the living and ancestral. Whether it’s the foundation of a Balkan home, the hearth of an Armenian or Greek household, or a deity in the kitchens of Pompeii to bring luck, the serpent’s multifaceted role shows up as protector, luck-bringer, and silent inhabitant. These carvings, reliefs, and myths are like different dialects of the same language. It’s a language in which the serpent isn’t feared but invited in, fed, honored, and trusted to hold the boundary. Across time and geography, the serpent becomes a shared archetype of home, memory, and power.<br /> <br /> <br /> </span> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/W2594980116346917010666621172591/snake-research-eastern-europe.jpg <div style="text-align: left"><span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.85); line-height: 1.2; --font-scale: 1.2;">Snakes in Albanian–Kosovan culture serve as spiritual protectors, embedded in architecture, oral mythology, jewelry, and everyday domestic beliefs. It shows how ancestral cosmologies across centuries of migration, conversion, and political upheaval reflect a continuum of a prehistoric Illyrian snake cult, in which serpents were seen as living household guardians and ancestral spirit keepers tied to the foundation of the home itself. Carved into arches, rooflines, and thresholds, these ornamental motifs marked the boundary between safety and danger, while serpent-shaped jewelry acted as portable amulets that extended the household’s spiritual shield onto the body. The cosmology collapses the divide between human, animal, and land—casting the snake as symbol, ancestor, and intermediary between visible and invisible worlds.</span></div><br /> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/G2604072090786888715589115378543/9.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/Y2604072237678311774538274896751/6.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/C2604072325650834262059126553455/7.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/D2607114743055733994043632974703/8.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/I2607125528571845986839110024047/serrpent.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/D2646822649028017579899892726639/2.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/U2646822717004269491519590431599/3.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/D2807970293511579916900425726831/23.PNG https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/F2807970293493133172826716175215/22.PNG https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/H2808496821805367884130891266927/27.PNG https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/D2809648048201768309788774169455/notes.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/V2905331104473626767113500425071/febcycle26.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/X2905449348841009008287741049711/4.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/X2905449409641477475234423176047/3.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/B2905449813219344319851993430895/2.png https://saminasiraj.cargo.site 2026-04-26T01:09:49+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/L2521645284211572779101017799535/9-22.PNG https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/P2809650522648018357188027939695/nptesc.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/L2905441809195537481351256800111/fire.mov https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/U2905478063596236466787073063791/atastrangersgatheringwk-4.jpg https://saminasiraj.cargo.site/diary 2026-04-24T23:58:15+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/T856944278602641779290021898844/vertical.svg <div style="text-align: center"><span class="caption" style="color: rgba(8, 7, 1, 0.85); background: rgb(250, 251, 245);">“Always knew that I would be different.”<br /> Bonner Str. Köln, 2022</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/A2522657106884354470969769393007/Screen-Shot-2025-08-27-at-3.05.08-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(1, 0, 0, 0.85);">Selections from Prison Notebooks <br /> by Antonio Gramsci p.324</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/G2523241817684690444022795926383/Screen-Shot-2025-08-27-at-11.53.30-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span class="caption" style="color: rgba(1, 0, 0, 0.85); background: rgb(250, 251, 245);">Autumn Evenings in Rhineland, 2022</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/I2523244619228606406439818951535/Screen-Shot-2025-08-27-at-11.56.02-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span class="caption" style="color: rgba(1, 0, 0, 0.85); background: rgb(250, 251, 245);">Eye of Horus on Hohenzollernbrücke, Köln, 2022</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/O2523256773603809132926283217775/Screen-Shot-2025-08-28-at-12.07.01-AM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span class="caption" style="color: rgba(8, 7, 1, 0.85); background: rgb(250, 251, 245);">“Always knew that I would be different.”<br /> Bonner Str. Köln, 2022</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/C2525729272467978158810108459887/IMG_2027.jpg <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(7, 0, 0, 0.85);">Mecca, 2017</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/H2525734127318976965837321861999/Screen-Shot-2025-05-12-at-10.03.04-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(17, 3, 3, 0.85);">Farmer’s Plight, 2021</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/K2525738433619147252963598859119/IMG_7692.JPG <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(31, 5, 5, 0.85);">Al-<i>Masjid</i> al-Nabawī, Medinah, 2017</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/R2525742893709822882606407678831/Screen-Shot-2025-08-29-at-1.33.12-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(10, 0, 0, 0.85);">Spring in North Rhine-Westphalia, 2022.</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/F2525745096177278307232032422767/Screen-Shot-2025-08-27-at-3.52.40-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span class="caption" style="color: rgba(6, 0, 0, 0.85);">Image Transfer Medium on Textile, 2025</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/U2525745236649234428530267978607/Screen-Shot-2025-08-27-at-2.49.43-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span class="caption" style="color: rgba(1, 0, 0, 0.85);">Tomato Harvest from my Mother’s Garden, 2023</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/T2525755255684683414620165831535/Screen-Shot-2023-04-24-at-12.00.32-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(17, 3, 3, 0.85);">Coffee and Tarot Reading in Istanbul, 2023</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/S2525785734077771528268599196527/Screen-Shot-2025-08-29-at-2.11.56-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(3, 0, 0, 0.85);">Built a mini outdoor altar <br /> for Christmas, 2024</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/Q2525788645970110539616159988591/temp_image_A4297ED7-19C5-425F-B5E1-F047461A1091.jpg <div style="text-align: center"><span class="caption" style="color: rgba(7, 0, 0, 0.85); background: rgb(250, 251, 245);">Spring in Washington Square Park, 2024</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/R2525794031312575418382658763631/Screen-Shot-2025-08-29-at-2.19.19-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">One of the few pieces remaining from <br /><i>Baptism of the Spirit</i>.</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/C2525797965412790530271312804719/53469171-B206-4E67-9046-D5607EFDB566.JPG <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(45, 10, 10, 0.85);">Briscola in Palermo, 2024</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/H2525801238621505713367861099375/Screen-Shot-2025-08-29-at-2.25.57-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(3, 0, 0, 0.85);">Studio Diary With Moon Lady on the Metro, 2025</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/A2525848958595983712975484287855/Screen-Shot-2025-08-29-at-3.09.04-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(6, 0, 0, 0.85);">November Afternoon in the Mountains, 2024  </span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/L2525854541337056924507894905711/Screen-Shot-2025-08-29-at-3.14.07-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(8, 0, 0, 0.85);">Palestina Libera, Palermo, 2024</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/W2525870569657642338516165393263/Screen-Shot-2025-08-29-at-3.28.36-PM.png <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(3, 0, 0, 0.85);">Watching Sleepy Autumn Days Go By <br />Somewhere in America, 2024</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/A2525871708817875866375815887727/4E9C7228-26EB-4EE1-98D9-FDABD61DDC53.JPG <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(11, 1, 1, 0.85);">Monsoon August reading Bulgakov <br /> in Italian and English, 2024</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/P2525888484434510450431731891055/temp_image_02ED7249-1D9B-44DA-94E0-949DB3551393.jpg <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(7, 0, 0, 0.85);">Notes from Pandemic Diary, 2021</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/T2525996802996288254044148530031/8a8a0971-0b46-4f52-b810-22220379391f.jpg <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(37, 8, 8, 0.85);">Throw the ring in your Creator’s court and see what happens. <br /> Your faith is your fortune, 2023</span></div> https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/X2525997115705493791568467524463/temp_image_7DA224D0-0D07-456C-80CE-23B09329C93C.jpg <div style="text-align: center"><span style="color: rgba(14, 0, 0, 0.85);">Still from a film screening in Köln, translated on Google, 2024 </span></div> https://saminasiraj.cargo.site/information 2026-04-26T01:10:59+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/P2521647048052347619060924218223/biophoto.png <br /> <br /> <span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.85); line-height: 1;"><span class="button-13">Samina Siraj is an antidisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher based between Lenapehoking and Köln. Her practice is concerned with the symbiotic relationships forged in liminal spaces between the human and more-than-human worlds. <span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.85); line-height: 1;">Through materially-focused, research-driven, and long-term projects, <span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.85); line-height: 1;">she explores current planetary urgencies and experiments with speculative imaginaries. Siraj presents these ideas through <span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.85); line-height: 1;"><span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.85); line-height: 1;">sculpture, drawing, painting, printmaking, and video. </span> </span> </span> </span>Drawing from decolonial epistemologies, ecological memory, and ancestral inheritances, her evolving body of work is a dialectic with past and present, where the <span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.85); line-height: 1;">living encounter the specters of the dead.</span></span> <br /> <br /> <div grid-col="x12" grid-pad="0"><span style="color: rgba(4, 4, 4, 0.85); --font-scale: 1.39;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/ss.sira" target="_blank">Instagram</a><br /> </span></div><div grid-col="x12" grid-pad="0"><span style="color: rgba(4, 4, 4, 0.85); --font-scale: 1.39;">+ 49 157 36084329<br /> EMAIL FOR CV AND FULL CATALOGUE<br /> saminasira@outlook.com</span></div></span><br /> <br /> https://saminasiraj.cargo.site/left-nav-—-desktop 2026-04-24T23:08:52+00:00 always 0.5 https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/N2521655980593017407731941440367/snake-research-gaza.png https://saminasiraj.cargo.site/header---mobile 2025-09-20T08:51:16+00:00 always 0.5 https://saminasiraj.cargo.site/footer 2026-02-22T20:41:52+00:00 always 0.5