Literature

Saj Issa engages with the amphora’s enduring form, reimagining it through contemporary codes. Here, steel has been cast invoking regional mythologies and traditions while also referencing Alexander Calder’s Astrium—a sculptural embodiment of purity and liberty. In this work Calder’s goddess is reconfigured through the artist’s lens, her limbs reimagined as gas pump handles, a wry commentary on the regions where water was once drawn but is now extracted for oil. This contemporary amphora carries more than material weight; it holds within the spectral presence of those displaced and the objects left behind.