What Remains on the Rug

What Remains on the Rug is a durational performance that investigates the intersection of domestic ritual, inherited memory, and embodied resilience. In the work, the artist repeatedly brushes a Turkish carpet stained with synthetic blood. The gesture, at once mundane and ceremonial, transforms a domestic act of care into a performative site of reckoning.
The carpet, an object historically inscribed with cultural symbolism, femininity, and intergenerational labour, becomes both witness and archive. As the artist’s repetitive movement attempts to erase the stain, the red traces persist, exposing the impossibility of cleansing what is historically and emotionally embedded. The work thus negotiates between visibility and erasure, questioning how violence and trauma are sustained within the intimate spaces of the home.
Drawing from feminist and materialist frameworks, What Remains on the Rug reconfigures care as an act of resistance. The performance situates the body within a continuum of domestic and cultural memory, where gestures of maintenance become modes of survival and testimony. Through this sustained engagement, the work highlights how the residue of collective and gendered histories persists, quietly and insistently, within the textures of everyday life.