Sinechak /سینه چاک/
Sose 2025
= The Ripped chest / To rip your chest open
Meaning(translated from Farsi): Suffered, Lover, bothered, sincere /An epic act of love and grief/
In context: Sacrificing sanity to liberate the truth of self
Project Description
Sinechak is a video installation by Mahla Mosah, with sound design by David Muñoz Hasselbrink. It is a personal meditation on spirituality, grief, and human suffering, drawing from Eastern spiritual practices. The work imagines a liminal space between the world of form and the formless, where the desire for transcendence exists alongside the need to give meaning to pain and identity.
Sinechak reflects the feeling of being stuck between two states of longing to be free but unable to let go. It treats dreams and hallucinations as real ways of sensing the self, beyond logic or control.
The open chest becomes a symbol of that fragile space in between, a place of exposure, uncertainty, which carries the possibility of change.
Background
The act of ripping the chest open serves as a powerful metaphor for revealing one's true self, embracing vulnerability, and seeking deeper truths. This motif underscores human aspiration toward authenticity and connection, represented across different eastern cultures, specially persian and Indian spiritual practices and literary traditions.
Ibn Arabi interprets this ripping and expansion of the chest as a removal of veils between the individual and divine reality. The heart becomes a polished mirror, capable of reflecting the truth.
Rumi (Jalal al-Din Balkhi) uses chest and heart imagery to refer to the place where pain, love, truth, and divine presence dwell.
“My chest opened like a rose, not to show its beauty, but to release the perfume of secrets I could no longer hold.”
"You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."
"You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art."
"The universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you already are."
Rumi - Paraphrased from Persian
From the flood of events, bright hearts are at peace;
In this ruin, the only commodity is moonlight.
Why does the oyster not split open its chest, O Ṣāʾib?
In this age where not many know the value of a true jewel.
Part from Ghazal No. 1660 – Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī
"Did We not expand your chest for you?" Quran,Surah al-Inshirah, 94:1
In Hindu mythology, Hanuman tells Sita that anything in which Lord Ram is not there is of no worth to him. Then, some jealous courtiers ask him that does Ram exist in him? Hanuman tears his chest open, and everyone is stunned to see Lord Ram and Sita in his chest.
Process
The starting ideation point of Sinechak came from a personal reflection on the contradictions i found with my personal beliefs and cultural roots. I have a deep connection with persian poetry which led me to the idea of Divana ,a figure driven into madness by devotion to the divine, and the imagery of ripping your chest open for love and truth captivated me. I found it dysphoric, surgical and somehow violent. This image became a mirror to my internal tension, an anger born from the distance of my fragmented socially inscribed body and this idea of liberation. I felt very close to it but it was still out of reach.
I wanted the process of creating Sinechak to grow from the same state of openness and uncertainty. I began without a fixed plan, taking daily notes, recording sounds, and experimenting with different materials. The first visual form of the project emerged through collage experiments, as I tried to give shape to the idea of formlessness. I did acts of deconstructing and reconstructing photos, mostly from geographical books with natural landscapes.
I was drawn to the spatial depth in these collages and wanted to emphasize it further. To do so, I rephotographed the collages using green screen and lighting setups that cast shadows, expanding their sense of dimension.
As the last stage, I brought in my reflection of form using videos from my personal archive and layered them in fragments with collages. Then recorded the different notes i wrote during the project to compose the sound and narration with David Muñoz Hasselbrink and created the final video.
Video Installation
My vision for the installation was to project the video onto a wall accompanied by a two-channel sound composition played from both sides of the space. A mirror is placed in front of the projection, inviting the audience to watch the video through reflection. As they do, their image becomes part of the work, a living collage within the larger composition. suspended between the screen and the mirror, between the image and its reflection, between form and formlessness.
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