Language as Surrogate for Home: The Material Afterlife of Persian Script in Iranian Diasporic Art.

The article examines how three Iranian diasporic artists—Parastou Forouhar, Golnar Adili, and Saba Sharifi—use the material form of Persian script in their art to evoke experiences of loss, absence, and memory of home. Through fragmented, illegible, and spatialized Persian script, these artists create embodied and affective encounters with language that reflect diasporic displacement rather than restoring linguistic or cultural continuity. Forouhar's immersive installation *Written Room* envelops viewers in illegible script to produce spatial disorientation; Adili's *Language Landscape* isolates and suspends the Persian letter ye from her late father's handwriting as a fragile material archive of loss; and Sharifi's *A Cup of Tea* uses ceramic tiles printed with tea imagery and fragments of Persian conversation to evoke sensory memories of home through everyday rituals. Drawing on Joseph Roach's concept of surrogation—the cultural process of re-creating presence through imperfect substitutions—the article argues these works materialize the tensions between presence and absence, offering alternative modes of diasporic memory through the sensuous and fragmented body of language itself.