It took Sholeh Asgary some time to find the rug – which now ties together the conceptual artist’s immersive month-long show inside a small gallery space on Willoughby Avenue. The room is kept pitch black, lit only by a bulb attached to a microphone that directs attention right below it, to a noteworthy bump in the carpet. You can get on your knees and touch the bump, as some do, and feel around as it moves slightly to the lightness of your touch. Asgary calls the piece “Qanat,” a Farsi word for the ancient system of underground aqueducts developed to transport water that’s still used in the country of Iran today. Indeed, around the room, a slight whooshing can be heard, not unlike the restless churn of a washing machine. 

The sound is – more or less – what’s keeping the corner of the rug up, says Asgary. “It’s being sent through a transducer, which affixes to a surface and uses the resident properties of that surface to transmit sound,” she says. “Qanat” is the centerpiece of one of Asgary’s biggest shows yet, itself called “By the Mouth of a Wadi,” a reference to an Arabic term for an ephemeral river.

“A wadi is a river regardless of whether it has been dry for centuries or if it currently contains water. One can also think about the mouth of a river past, or a river that has not yet run dry,” Asgary clarifies in an email that she sent a few days later.