BITE: A Performance by Raheleh Filsoofi

Performance: 6:30 PM (Great Hall)
Artist Talk: 7:00 PM (Lecture Hall)
Reception to Follow  

Join us for an evening with artist Raheleh Filsoofi, who returns to the Nasher Museum following her fall 2025 research visit to present a live performance of BITE, an ongoing ritual-based artwork exploring memory, migration, and the body’s relationship to land.

During her visit, Filsoofi gathered native clay from the Nasher Museum grounds, which she has transformed into ceramic plates specifically for this performance. BITE centers on the intimate and deliberate act of biting the clay plate—an imprint of presence, resistance, and reclamation. Through this gesture, Filsoofi engages the material histories of place and the embodied experience of marking, shaping, and being shaped by one’s environment. One of the plates from this performance will join the museum’s collection.

Following the performance, Filsoofi will give an artist talk in the Lecture Hall, expanding on her process, themes, and the significance of creating and using locally sourced clay within her practice. A brief reception will follow.

This program is free and open to the public.

Raheleh Filsoofi, a collector of soil and sound, is an itinerant artist, community advocate, and feminist curator. Working across performance, ceramics, printmaking, installation, music, and multimedia, her work revolves around themes of movement, immigration, and social activism in effort to disrupt the borders that exist between individuals and nations to create a more inclusive world. A nationally and internationally exhibited artist, Filsoofi has been honored with many awards, including a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Art Projects Grant, 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellowship, the 1858 Contemporary Southern Art Award in 2022, and a 2021 Southern Prize Tennessee State Fellowship. An Assistant Professor of Ceramics in the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University with a secondary appointment at the Blair School of Music, she received her M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Florida Atlantic University and a B.F.A. in Ceramics from Al-Zahra University in Tehran, Iran.