DUBAI: Palestinian-Canadian artist Samar Hejazi pulls on the threads of her past to create visually compelling works that explore what it means to cultivate an identity outside the framework of a nation-state.
The Dubai-based multi-disciplinary artist made headlines earlier this year when her sculptural work was showcased at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the Costume Institute exhibition heralded by the glitzy Met Gala.
Now, her textile and audio-visual installation “Maw6ini” (2018) will be exhibited at the MENART fair in Paris, which runs from Oct. 23-25.
As powerful as it is to be a Palestinian artist with such a high-profile platform, Hejazi insists that her inspiration extends beyond any one community.
“When people see my work, they think I’m just talking about being Palestinian,” she tells Arab News. “That’s just the culture that I’m entitled to speak from, but what I’m actually talking about is these systems and these narratives — these things that make you perform in specific ways that are essentially servicing a different agenda and not for your own benefit.”
Many of the Toronto-educated artist’s works, including “Maw6ini,” explore what it means to form an identity outside of the typical ideals of nationality. Hejazi says she seeks to depict how “identity is constructed and how it exists … even though it doesn’t fall under the definitions that are given to us for an identity to exist.”
Those imposed definitions, she says, refer to an identity or culture existing “within the boundaries of a land or within close proximity to each other.”
The artist materializes that concept through her traditional Palestinian tatreez embroidery, which is deliberately created without a fabric backing.
“I want to see if the threads can hold themselves or these letters can hold themselves without fabric,” she explains. “Fabric is seen as the support of thread or the support of embroidery, so fabric could be like land.”
“Maw6ini” also explores the lived experiences of the Palestinian and wider Arab diaspora through their appropriation of the Latin alphabet and numerals. In the age of instant communication, numerals have been adopted to stand in place of Arabic letters for which there are no strict Latin counterparts. The work features embroidered lyrics to the anthem “Mawtini (homeland)” by Palestinian poet Ibrahim Touqan.
Hejazi uses Latin letters and symbols in addition to Arabic script to show how identity and language can evolve and continue to exist, even with the diaspora’s limited access to Arabic keyboards.
The artist chose to hang her work, which was created using A4-sized sheets (which she says is a play on the colonial obsession with standardization).
“After I hung it up and saw the way the light was dealing with the letters and casting these shadows all over the place, that’s when I felt like this work is actually teaching me that it’s not just in the material, it’s also in the immaterial,” she says.
The non-physical aspects of the installation helped her to “process this idea (that) just because I can’t explain to everyone else how my identity exists or why it continues to exist, I now understand deeply that it does and it will.”
Although the Hejazi’s most-reported-on work was sculptural, her textile-based artworks are numerous, and she engages in printmaking. In a region where weaves and patterns are such an important part of the storytelling culture, from Palestinian tatreez to Gulf sadu, it is notable that a contemporary artist is using traditional techniques.
“I think the reason why textiles have been able to carry a culture and a narrative is because when the West occupied or took over or colonized, they didn’t understand the importance of textiles,” Hejazi says.
“Textiles were the first means of writing, communicating. We know a lot about the ancient culture (and) civilizations in South America because Western Europe didn’t understand how important these things were, and they didn’t destroy them so they became holders of information,” she continues, adding that the traditionally female-led crafts of weaving and textile making may have been overlooked simply due to who was creating them.
As Hejazi keeps exploring identity, it is not immaterial, then, that she is doing so via the humble needle and thread.