Installation view “For Safiya 1-7”, Flame and Steel Pigment on Silk, Steel Frame, 2025
In this work I return to an image of my late grandaunt on the day of her first marriage, a ceremony staged on the rooftop of her family home where she and her two sisters were wed, in parallel, to three brothers. The union did not endure, yet she remains to me an emblem of aspirational matrimony, a figure who upheld the communal scripts of her time and gave quiet form to the adage حلاة الثوب رقعته منه وفيه, that the beauty of a garment lies in mending it from itself. Drawing from this photograph, I extract fragments and translate them onto silk that echoes the texture of her wedding dress. These patches are printed in steel pigment, a material language I return to often as I negotiate soft and hard, yielding and unyielding, within my broader practice. The resulting assemblage performs a gesture of repair that is neither restorative nor nostalgic, but rather attentive to the complex architectures of kinship, duty, and desire that scaffold the institution of marriage. By isolating and reconstituting these visual remnants, the work becomes a contemplation on inherited ideals and the fissures that underlie them. It lingers on the tension between the communal expectations that shape women’s lives and the quiet resilience with which they navigate their unravelings. In this act of repatching, mending from within, the piece proposes marriage not as a singular event but as a fabric continually altered, stressed, and remade through the hands of those who inhabit it.
In this work I return to an image of my late grandaunt on the day of her first marriage, a ceremony staged on the rooftop of her family home where she and her two sisters were wed, in parallel, to three brothers. The union did not endure, yet she remains to me an emblem of aspirational matrimony, a figure who upheld the communal scripts of her time and gave quiet form to the adage حلاة الثوب رقعته منه وفيه, that the beauty of a garment lies in mending it from itself. Drawing from this photograph, I extract fragments and translate them onto silk that echoes the texture of her wedding dress. These patches are printed in steel pigment, a material language I return to often as I negotiate soft and hard, yielding and unyielding, within my broader practice. The resulting assemblage performs a gesture of repair that is neither restorative nor nostalgic, but rather attentive to the complex architectures of kinship, duty, and desire that scaffold the institution of marriage. By isolating and reconstituting these visual remnants, the work becomes a contemplation on inherited ideals and the fissures that underlie them. It lingers on the tension between the communal expectations that shape women’s lives and the quiet resilience with which they navigate their unravelings. In this act of repatching, mending from within, the piece proposes marriage not as a singular event but as a fabric continually altered, stressed, and remade through the hands of those who inhabit it.
