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Orphaned Shadows is an ongoing body of work that explores cultural heritage, archaeology, conflict, and glass in relation to Afghanistan. When the Valkhof Museum invited her to create a new body of work incorporating their collection with a vast archeological focus, Narges Mohammadi dived into their database in an attempt to find a connection, a closeness to her origins. In this attempt, she rather stumbled on displacement. She found a few glass artefacts of unclear origin that may be related to Afghanistan.

These objects have been remade by the artist; glass blown to resemble the original artefacts from the Valkhof Museum as much as possible. Understanding the inherent material qualities of glass and the difficulty of determining its origin using traditional archeological dating tools are obsolete, as historically, glass has a tradition of being melted into new objects over time. Therefore, its material composition changes over time in ways not empirically determined. Looking at the Valkhof Museum’s collection inspired further research into the history of glassmaking in Afghanistan.

This tradition has largely been absent from dominant historical narratives. The artist found archival images of glass artefacts in one source: the Catalogue of the National Museum of Afghanistan 1931-1985, published by UNESCO in 2006. How they came into this collection remains uncertain. Mohammadi decided to remake a selection of the glass artefacts featured in this catalogue. Relying entirely on these grainy black-and-white images, a custom-built algorithmic programme rendered three-dimensional objects from two-dimensional images.

Throughout the installation, the selected glass objects occupy different states of accessibility. While some survive physically within the pristine collections of Valkhof Museum, they remain distant from the communities and contexts from which they originate. The second half of the collection from the UNESCO archive of the National Museum of Afghanistan exists only in photographs, catalogues, or archival references. Through processes of 3D reconstruction and translation, these materials are reimagined in solid glass. Rather than being replicas, they are contemporary encounters that question what remains: fragments, reproductions, records, and traces that continue to shape cultural memory despite interruption, displacement, and loss.

The works are connected by a comet-like form made from pulverised lapis lazuli, one of Afghanistan’s most historically significant materials. Spanning across the floor, the deep blue field recalls both a celestial trace and a geological remnant. For centuries, lapis lazuli travelled across continents through networks of trade, exchange, and extraction. Here, reduced to dust, it functions not as a precious object but as a connective surface that links the works to mining and excavation.

At the centre of the piece is a glass replica made of an ancient sundial found in Ay Khanum (Afghanistan). Activated by a light installation consisting of twelve spots, the movement of the light re-enacts the day of Mohammadi’s assumed birth in a twelve-minute loop. As it moves through the glass, it casts shifting shadows that reflect the measurement of time, while also revealing the instability of historical narratives. These shadows point toward things that can no longer be fully accessed, suggesting that histories remain present yet are partially obscured.

The act of reconstruction itself remains central to Orphaned Shadows. Every object is shaped by the available technologies, materials, expertise, and decisions of the present day. As such, reconstruction becomes a process of interpretation rather than recovery. The resulting works occupy a space between preservation and translation, bearing the marks of both their origins and the conditions of their remaking.