At the Edge of Arrival
Solo Exhibition
The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art
August 22 - December 6, 2025
Photo: Courtesy of the Halsey Institute
At the Edge of Arrival presents a constellation of works—dust paintings, vessels, sound, and video—that explore migration and land through the lens of a Middle Eastern immigrant woman in the American South. In this exhibition, Raheleh Filsoofi weaves together her own migration from Iran with the forced migration of enslaved Africans to Charleston, creating a poetic dialogue across histories, geographies, and materials. Rather than seeking similarity, she invites resonance—through shared land and layered histories.
Having lived and worked across nine Southern states over two decades, Filsoofi understands the South not just as a place, but as a living archive of labor, displacement, and survival. Working with clay connects her to this legacy—especially to David Drake, better known as “Dave the Potter,” an enslaved African who worked in the pottery factories of Edgefield, South Carolina. His large-scale vessels carried both function and resistance, known for the inscriptions of his original poetry. Like him, Filsoofi inscribes meaning into the earth—into what is buried, remembered, and heard.
At the Edge of Arrival is a meditation on what it means to arrive, to remember, and to listen to what lingers in the soil. It honors the people and stories rooted in this region while asking: What connects us across difference? What echoes remain at the threshold of arrival?
The Inh(a/i)bited Space, Ceramics, wire and sound, 2016-2025
Sound editing and music in collaboration with Reza Filsoofi
Handmade ceramic vessels hold fragments of sound gathered across southern states, becoming containers of resonance and trace. The solidity of clay and the ephemerality of sound converge here, reflecting on the paradox of inhibited and inhabited space shaped by shifting immigration policies. Melodic and ambient noise flow through the vessels, fleeting yet connective, evoking the complex bonds that tie us to place.
The Imagined Landscape, Video, 2025
Videography in Collaboration with Ali Ahamdi
Fragments of landscapes are assembled into a moving collage, tracing the artist’s desire to sense place through navigation, listening, and witnessing. In this work, landscape becomes imagined - pieced together from perception and memory rather than fixed geography. The video offers a meditation on migration, connection, and the shifting ground of movement and belonging.
Meeting Ground
and
Transient Yet Permanent #2
Argillotype (Clay Paint), 2025
Clay sourced from nine southern states
This series brings together clay-printed poems, silhouettes of cotton, indigo, and a Ginkgo branch—plants and forms tied to layered histories of labor, migration, adaptation, and survival. Using clay gathered across the southern landscape, the works trace how human stories and ancestral echoes remain inscribed in the land, asking where ghosts rest, where ancestors meet, and how bodies carry memory across distance and time. The Ginkgo, bridging East and West, becomes a quiet emblem of resilience and rootedness, its delicate permanence reflecting the strength of those who relocate, endure, and leave their marks upon the places they inhabit.
The Edge of Arrival, Dust Poems, 2023-2025
Argillotype (Clay Paint), Paper, dust, glass
Book cover by Jerry Bedor Phillips
This book holds the artist’s poems printed on paper with clay she collected and processed from soils across nine southern states. The poems trace the artist’s movement through the South, reflecting on its histories with particular attention to Charleston as a site of forced migration.
The Edge of Arrival becomes a dialogue through dust, place, and language, linking the artist’s experience as a Middle Eastern immigrant woman to earlier histories of displacement. It is an homage to endurance, honoring those who lived, labored, and left their marks on this land. From bondage to exile to survival, the work asks where these stories meet, and where they collide, within the shared ground of clay.