Hippopotamus teeth

This project emerges from an inquiry into archaeological remains discovered in the region of Anatolia, present day Turkey, situated along the colonial trade routes of the ancient Assyrian Empire. At its center is a furniture support in the form of a lion’s paw, dating to the 18th century B.C. and now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The object, carved from hippopotamus ivory, carries within it a layered history: a story of craftsmanship, of symbolic form, and of the extensive networks of commerce and exchange that enabled such materials to circulate across distant geographies.

My process began with the manipulation of the museum image of this fragment, which I translated into photogravure and reprinted in multiple variations. Through this act of reinscription, the object became a site of experimentation, one where I could both explore its formal qualities and, at the same time, investigate the historical and material conditions that shaped its existence. The use of hippopotamus ivory in particular reveals hidden economies of extraction and trade in antiquity, drawing attention to how natural resources were transformed into objects of power, ornament, and exchange.

The work unfolds as a kind of anthology of this artifact, where image, material, and history intersect. By recontextualizing the fragment beyond its canonical museum display, I sought to strip it of its fixed symbolic meaning and reimagine it within a broader archaeology of the ancient Near East. In doing so, the project becomes not only a meditation on an isolated object but also a reflection on the circulation of matter, the persistence of trade routes, and the fragile afterlives of fragments that survive across millennia.