SEEING WITH HASSAN SHARIF (Book Chapter)

Journal of Modern Craft, 2008

Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, 2023

As the main object of discussion, the 'plastic archive' is the term I use to describe the sheets of plastic that my mother salvaged over the years to trace embroidery patterns on when she was still a local tailor. This visual-textual essay explores the poetry (and the lack of such) of my mother's craft. She retired from her job in the late 2010s due to bad eyesight and other health problems, so what is left of her work is a collection of embroidery templates that I found by accident in early 2022. As a tribute to her, I used these materials to create a series of mixed media collages to reflect on the length of her career, as well as her strategies and attitudes toward visual configurations as a non-visual artist. Ultimately, by drawing from art history and resisting it, I aim to address the discursive aspects of Vietnamese identity, queerness, language, art writing, and poetic instinct.

Some encounters accumulate in one's memory, slipping away from the soul and the mind, joining the list of things forgotten, waiting for a certain moment, a glimpse or a reflection to break their shell and form an artistic project-even one that does not necessarily meet conventional definitions of contemporary art. This is the artist and poet Farid Abu Shakra, with whom I am linked in bonds of friendship since the days of our bachelor degree at Tel Aviv University, during which we also started formulating a lyrical lexicon for our unique situation and our struggle with language, culture, and the other, the defeats of the 1980s and 1990s that shaped our soul, which was fragile after all the defeats that have placed us in the category of "unrecog-nized"-existentially, nationally, and culturally. I do not claim that much has changed since, yet in the painful reality in which we live today, the piece's special awareness has certainly made a full circle, and in the past couple of years, overcame many conventions and hurdles that we encountered back then and did not know how to deal with. Recently, our encounters have been renewed. We meet at exhibitions and through Abu Shakra's recent artworks in the studio where he lives on week

2014

The key aim of this paper is to consider and reflect upon means and ways that knowledge gained through textile practice, material-conceptual tacit knowledge, can be expressed through textile processes and technologies derived from that practice itself. Sarat Maharaj writes of artist-theorist Janis Jefferies' articulation of her relationship with textile practice and theory as 'The drenched-invoice quality of [her] think-speak-write sequences, their soaked-in-oral feel signals the pivotal element of her expression-unscriptedness' 1. In this Maharaj highlights an indivisible oral-practice-textual interplay and in this sense foregrounds Jefferies' practice in terms of a set of intimate bodily technologies. In consciously drawing upon textilerooted language and material practice here, I want to actively highlight the specifics that such processes refer to in terms of form, function, embodiment and language, whilst opening themselves up metaphorically and conceptually. In this they share that 'drenched-in' quality that Maharaj finds in Jefferies' writing-thinking practice. The framework or matrix of knowledge that I will be proposing and outlining here draws particularly on the relationships and intertwinings between text, textile and techne (craftsmanship). These notions not only share etymological roots, but they can be considered also as formative processes and technologies that together establish an interwoven structure in which writing and making are brought together as concomitant partners of knowledge-production. The matrix proposed posits language and text as modes of practice alongside and in mixture with materialbased textile practice suggesting writing textile and making text as emergent forms of articulating text-textile-techne interplay. This also serves to preserve the relationship between theory and practice as one in which practice articulates theory at the same time and in the same space as theory or text materialises meaning. In order to explore this matrix further, this paper will focus upon the process and technologies of seaming and making seams. As such this paper takes as its point of departure ways in which tacit knowledge caught up in the foundational processes and activities of making are brought into intimate relationship with written and aural modes of communication. These material processes suggest a generative and communicative conceptual-material model for thinking-making-speaking about and the intimacies of making. Seaming 'The hand-stitched line acts as a tracing-as if my fingers were slowly tracing the pathways that I am stitching as a way to map them and as a way to understand them.' 2 The idea of making a seam will be considered here primarily as a concept by which to trace a pathway between theory and practice (text and textile). This paper will explore techniques and processes for making seams to create this pathway both metaphorically and literally. In this, seaming will be taken in terms of its capacity to extend the cloth, but will also address aggressive and disruptive aspects of needle and thread passing through the textile. In this paper there will be a focus upon the status of conjunctions, crossings, edges, boundaries and exchanges, thus drawing on precedents such as

Theory, Culture & Society, 2015

The authors explore how the multi-media artist Farniyaz Zaker uses words to establish connections between different kinds of materials in her work, and how her work makes words material. Zaker’s conception of dress as ‘microcosmic dwelling places’ enables the authors to think about veiling practices, Islams and gender not only in relation to the familiar domains of state, piety, subjectivity, consumption, capitalism, public and private (for instance), but also with regard to some less self-evidently relevant contexts. Light, architecture and cinema, as well as walls, windows, curtains, coffins, tents and screens, are among them. It is by way of these multiple refractions that the authors are able to return to those debates that conceive of Islamic veiling in terms of embodied, material practices and to support and develop further reasons for an understanding of that most exceptionally charged piece of material, the veil, as more than a sign of … Language English

2009

Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Research problem and context: material and artistic expression in textile art 2.1 Textile artworld: textile art and textile artists 2.2 Aim, problem field and research questions 2.3 Researcher's position: textile artist and writer 2.4 Research through own creative work: practice-led approach 2.5 Research through professional practice in other disciplines 3. Research approaches and process 3.1 Research approaches and documentation 3.2 Five phases of research process 3.3 Development of research problem Before the actual creation of the artwork 4. Paper string and artistic expression: two components 4.1 Materiality of paper string 4.1.1 Physical characteristics 4.1.2 Significance of paper string in recent Finnish history 4.2 Subjectivity of artistic expression 4.2.1 Meanings of expression in ordinary language 4.2.2 Various concepts of expression The conceptualisation and the creation of the artwork in the studio 5. Incorporation of paper string and artistic expression in creative production 5.1 "Seeing Paper"-material as focal point 5.1.1 Metaphorical meaning of material 5.1.2 Initial experience with three dissimilar types of material 5.1.3 Bodily and visual experience with material in artistic production 5.1.4 Visual experience with material in completed artefacts 5.2 "Paper World"-making expression explicit 5.2.1 Metaphorical meaning of material in exhibition context 5.2.2 Material's connection with exhibition context and artefacts in artistic production 5.2.3 Experience with material in completed artefacts i After the actual creation of the artwork-viewing artworks in exhibition space 6. Paper string and artistic expression in context 6.1 "Seeing Paper"-material and artistic expression in neutral space 6.1.1 Artworks and their materials in neutral space 6.1.2 Audience and artworks in white space 6.2 "Paper World"-material and artistic expression in contextualised space 6.2.1 Contextualising artworks and their material 6.2.2 Audience and artworks in imaginary dwelling 7. Discussion-paperness as conception intertwining material and artistic expression 7.1 Main findings 7.1.1 Artwork as formed material incorporating materiality and subjectivity 7.1.2 Making is expressing 7.1.3 Material manipulating meanings of functional objects 7.1.4 Context in which artworks and their material are experienced 7.2 Evaluation 7.2.1 Own artwork as case study 7.2.2 Applying materialness in textile pedagogy 7.3 Reflections on research process Bibliography List of Illustrations List of Appendices: 1. List of Finnish Textile Artists of the Year from the present to 1981 2. List of words given to each individual work in "Seeing Paper" 3. Maja Gecic's email to the author commenting on "Seeing Paper" 4. List of comments given to the overall exhibition of "Paper World" 5. Anna Huhta's email to the author commenting on "Paper World" 1 "Artistic production" or "art production" in this study comprises acts and activities in a creative process, making artworks, putting them on display in an exhibition, and asking viewers for feedback. 2 Research through art and design is a model of research in art and design first suggested by the British educationist Christopher Frayling (1993). This model represents research where art or design practice is the tool of performing the research and of communicating the results.

The Art Bulletin, 2013

on this and the next earliest copy of the text, now in Doha. 5 As a nonspecialist, I was struck that so little attention seemed to have been hitherto paid to the colophon as a problematic physical object. Once this documentary anchor had been cut away, our group was able to speculate freely on date and provenance. We followed Savage-Smith on the dating (to the later twelfth century, perhaps?), but on provenance, judging by stylistic considerations of the drawings, we were naturally able to span the Islamic world, from central Asia to North Africa. I myself rather fancied an Egyptian attribution but, more seriously, I hope that further specialist study of this important manuscript will start with a close examination of the thing itself.

American Book Review, 2020