Learning Lab

This work came from me observing my grandmother for years, and one fine morning it was just an idea to photograph her hands because her hands were completely, kind of, they became one with the material and the material became one with her hands.

She had this continuous movement. It was it was like I was, I will see the in-between energies which were surrounding her hands.

Mohammed has been a very important influence; she's been everything to me in my life and I have grown up with her. It's been a journey with her, however where she's been working with textiles and with yarns and with threads all her life, for me it was like part of growing up in that environment.

I work with her fibers - textiles, which are back in my country, which the craftsmen and weavers have been working for years. The techniques I use kind of, they’re invented by us, so they don't exist in in like history.

And it's not about the textile, it's about the language. It's about an abstract language and trying to communicate through the works, of me wanting to search within the answers which I never could resolve in day-to-day living my life so it was more about me wanting to go within - wanting to ask questions about living, about life, feelings, the physicality, the tactility of the materials, which we are just not aware, which we've lost in our day-to-day livings.

So yes there is a so the process of me doing these works which made me search, you know, different ways which made me engage with textiles in a very different approach.

This is an installation work that uses an old open reel recorder player. The recorder player is on top of a tall tower and the tape falls slowly down as it plays and creates a pattern, and at a certain point the tape rewinds back and play a certain melody.

When the tape is falling it creates a very low sound but by having it reel up quickly, the actual song is exposed, sort of like revealing a secret code.

It was inspired by when I saw the tape fall out from a broken tape player and I imagined a scenario in my head [?] the future. Finding these ancient arcade machines like this, being fascinated by them and making a monument out of them, something to signify the technology of the 21st century.

The work ‘70,000 veils’ has taken seven years to make. Of course, initially I didn't have an idea what the work will look like or what will eventuate in that time. The work in terms of the process, consists of ten thousand still images taken from my travels of four or five years and then these images are taken and then deconstructed layer for layer to form ten thousand different layers, and then those layers are reconfigured and composited again to form 70,000 veils then they’re animated.

What inspires the work: Rūmī, Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī - known as a poet in the West but he was a mystic, a Sufi mystic said, “between the individual and the divine there are 70,000 layers and none between the divine and the individual’, and this inspired me and got me thinking about not just from a metaphysical view but also from physical life. I mean you walk into the work; you can choose not to put on the 3d glasses you can choose to put them on.

For me that that symbolizes life generally - you can walk through life and have a rewarding life and you would never have to think about if there is anything out there, or you can cross a threshold, a rite of passage and behind the work is all the wires and the sticky tape and the glue and the bolts and the nuts, and the wood frame and so on. Essentially, it's the workings behind the universe, held by nails and bolts.

I'm very inspired by psychology and cognitive science and it's a kind of analytic relationship, psychoanalysis relationship between you and the object. So, I'm showing wave of happiness, frustration and paranoia.

So, psychosomatic series it's something that you build in your mind and then you react in your body. The idea of the works is to create relationships with people and objects so the objects are in bed with emotions like the happiness or frustration or paranoia, and generally objects doesn't have emotions only us, and computers doesn't have emotions.

So the idea is to create emotions in the objects that are activated by humans so then you could be able to have a relationship with the object.