Dr. Irit Carmon Popper | Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (original) (raw)

Papers by Dr. Irit Carmon Popper

Dada and Its Later Manifestations in the Geographic Margins Israel, Romania, Poland, and North America, Apr 17, 2024

This volume focuses on the unstudied geographic margins of Dada, delving into the roots of Dada i... more This volume focuses on the unstudied geographic margins of Dada, delving into the roots of Dada in Israel, Romania, Poland, and North America. Contributors consider some of the practices and experiments that were conceived a century ago, surfaced in art throughout the twentieth century, and are still relevant today. Unearthing its Israeli origins, examining Dadaist expressions in Poland, and shedding light on overlooked facets of Dadaist art in Romania and North America, the authors cast a spotlight on the less-explored geographical peripheries of Dada. The book is organized around four thematic trajectories—space, language, materiality, and reception—which are dissected through the lens of micro-histories. Recognizing the continuing validity of questions raised by Dadaist artists, this volume argues that Dada persists as an ongoing endeavor—a continual reexamination of the fundamental tenets of art and its ever-evolving potential manifestations.

PART I: Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries
Paper 3. Through the Eyes of an Architect, the Soul of an Artist: Marcel Janco and Ein Hod Artist Colony | Irit Carmon Popper
Dada artist and architect, Marcel Janco, prevented the demolishing of the Palestinian village of Ein Hawd after the 1948 war. He succeeded in restoring the village, and establishing the Ein Hod artist colony. We offer a new perspective to this seminal story, rooting Janco’s praxis as an Israeli planning official in his earlier 1920s avant-garde circles. In Zurich Janco worked with Dadaist methods of readymade, disunity and collage that were inspired by the non-European Other. After the Great War, he participated in reconstructing destroyed towns in Northern France according to regionalist principles. Back in Bucharest, he practiced ‘Soft Modern’ architecture, reminiscent of the empiricist attitude of the arts and crafts. This reputation legitimized his oppositional ideology, allowing him to undermine Israeli institutional treatment of Arab architecture.
The paper retrospectively interprets Janco’s mobilization of artists to rehabilitate the houses and urban fabric of the village through the lens of contemporary theories. It identifies in the collectives he assembled acts of participatory art that resulted in preserving an ideal type of a Palestinian village. While activating a yet unknown toolbox of preservation, his radical position vis-à-vis state institution and his successful rehabilitation project also entails a civic negation and reappropriation of the Palestinian other that was expelled inland.

Palestinians call Israel’s Independence the Nakba, i.e., the catastrophe that drove them out of t... more Palestinians call Israel’s Independence the Nakba, i.e., the catastrophe that drove them out of their homes, destroyed their villages, expropriated their land, and denied their right to return. This paper focuses on the impressive remains of two villages - Ayn Hawd and Kufr Birim - in order to examine how Israeli and Palestinian artists, by means of their disciplinary operations, intervened in preserving physical edifices or suppressed narratives. The first is Ayn Hawd, on whose remains of which Marcel Janco, a famous Jewish Dada artist, established an artists’ colony. He prevented the destruction of the village, restored and reused it, yet was also involved in its dispossession. The second is Kufr Birim – a closed military zone situated in a national park – where Palestinian artists perform, regularly yet temporarily, site specific art interventions. They belong to a larger group of activists who renovate the church and perform religious, educational and cultural events in situ. In both cases, the artistic actions advanced an oppositional ideology within the dominant institutional apparatus that safeguarded the minority heritage. We propose to examine how art intervention deciphers the site through a different toolkit, and thus succeeds to expand the boundaries of preservation and approximates towards an experimental practice. Can preservation select its addressees? And if so, can we still consider it an act of preservation? The paper challenges the dominant practice with an alternative approach to transcultural heritage, based on interdisciplinary research tying together contemporary art theories, architectural heritage and political philosophy of sites in conflict.

Premio Bruno Zevi per un saggio storico-critico sull’architettura. © LetteraVentidue Edizioni, 2021

The paper reexamines the village of Ein Hawd, which unlike most Arab villages, was not demolished... more The paper reexamines the village of Ein Hawd, which unlike most Arab villages, was not demolished by the Jewish authorities in the 1950s, arguably thanks to the intervention of Marcel Janco, a well-known Dada artist and a modern architect by training, who established the Ein Hod artist colony on the village remains. Janco restored the village and reused it, yet was also involved in its dispossession. I propose to investigate the establishment of the artist colony as inspired by Janco's past practices in the avant-garde circles of the early 20th century. The paper seeks to reveal the intertwining of those practices as a single act motivated by Janco’s background, enabling him to produce a new sense of identity while appropriating another. Janco used Dadaist methods of readymade, disunity and collage, inspired by the non-European cultural Other. He was also inspired by collective and collaborative actions by artists motivated by social change. In the interwar period, he took part in the Grande Reconstruction in the destroyed towns of northern France, which were restored according to regionalist principles. Afterwards, back in Bucharest, he practiced “soft modern” architecture – a moderate practice reminiscent of the empiricist attitude of turn-of-the-century arts and crafts.
In the aftermath of the 1948 war in Israel/Palestine, his avant-garde background allowed him, now an active agent of the state planning apparatus, to promote an oppositional ideology and undermine institutional modes of thinking on the preservation of Arab architecture. I examine how artists intervened in preserving structures or suppressed narratives of sites-in-conflict and propose to interpret their interventions as acts of preservation, as
they undermined the supremacy of top-down national heritage agenda. The research questions the acceptance
of contemporary artistic intervention within the political system, destabilizing institutional modes of thinking, and
how poetical visionary art relates to the ethical issues involved.
The research challenges the boundaries of art and architecture discourses with an interdisciplinary approach combining contemporary art and architectural preservation. It proposes an innovative methodology that applies a social practice discourse – relational aesthetics, participatory art and collaborative art theories – to analyze retrospectively artistic modes of action as creative agents that unsettle the boundaries of the heritage policy and promotes an alternative model. This analysis seeks to expand the boundaries of the discourse of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict by challenging common narratives about historical events such as the Ein Hawd/Hod story from a contemporary perspective.

YOUR WAY OR MY WAY? Questions on Authenticity, Identity and Patrimonial Proceedings in the Safeguarding of Architectural Heritage Created in the Meeting of Cultures, 2017

Palestinians call Israel’s Independence the Nakba, i.e., the catastrophe that drove them out of t... more Palestinians call Israel’s Independence the Nakba, i.e., the catastrophe that drove them out of their homes, destroyed their villages, expropriated their land, and denied their right to return. This paper focuses on the impressive remains of two villages - Ayn Hawd and Kufr Birim - in order to examine how Israeli and Palestinian artists, by means of their disciplinary operations, intervened in preserving physical edifices or suppressed narratives.
The first is Ayn Hawd, on whose remains of which Marcel Janco, a famous Jewish Dada artist, established an artists’ colony. He prevented the destruction of the village, restored and reused it, yet was also involved in its dispossession. The second is Kufr Birim – a closed military zone situated in a national park – where Palestinian artists perform, regularly yet temporarily, site specific art interventions. They belong to a larger group of activists who renovate the church and perform religious, educational and cultural events in situ. In both cases, the artistic actions advanced an oppositional ideology within the dominant institutional apparatus that safeguarded the minority heritage.
We propose to examine how art intervention deciphers the site through a different toolkit, and thus succeeds to expand the boundaries of preservation and approximates towards an experimental practice. Can preservation select its addressees? And if so, can we still consider it an act of preservation? The paper challenges the dominant practice with an alternative approach to transcultural heritage, based on interdisciplinary research tying together contemporary art theories, architectural heritage and political philosophy of sites in conflict.

Future Anterior , 2018

Bar'am national park in Israel contains both the remains of an ancient synagogue and the ruins o... more Bar'am national park in Israel contains both the remains of an ancient synagogue and the ruins of a Palestinian village. The architecture of the synagogue is restored as the central structure of the park, while the remains of the Palestinian village – a closed military area - are restricted and neglected. The existing architectural fabric on site does not reflect a consolidated agenda of preservation, but rather a political policy of occupation and discrimination by turning the history of demolition of the agrarian Palestinian land into a seemingly pacified site of national heritage. The village descendants are allowed to enter for ephemeral activities, which they use to perform social and artistic activities on site.
The study examines a series of site-specific installations of a contemporary artist and architect, a descendant of the villagers, on site. Through their inherent impermanence and non-recurring characteristics, the art interventions succeed to break through the fixed boundaries of the dominant heritage and allow hidden layers to surface. We analyze the art practices in light of recent preservation theory. In the context of an intractable national conflict, we further argue, such participatory action opens venues to discuss preservation as an act of civil rights, which challenges the official history as an alternative creative-performative model of preserving heritage.

Thesis Chapters by Dr. Irit Carmon Popper

PhD Dissertation, 2019

Dissertation Summary The dissertation explores Israeli artists, both Jewish and Palestinian, who ... more Dissertation Summary
The dissertation explores Israeli artists, both Jewish and Palestinian, who have intervened in preserving the physical remains and suppressed narratives of depopulated Palestinian sites. The residents of these villages and urban quarters were deported by the military forces of the Jewish population during the post-partition war of 1948. The war that culminated in the declaration of the State of Israel and the Nakba of the Palestinians, transformed the physical and human landscape of Mandate Palestine. During and after the war Israeli officials wished to ruin the evacuated architectural environments, yet various artists used the materiality of the sites as a platform for interventions, for promoting the preservation of the vernacular architecture and for evoking its suppressed meanings.
Scholars have studied these sites through the lenses of geography, anthropology, political science, and art history, but this study offers an alternative approach by shifting the conceptual lens onto some reciprocal insights in the fields of contemporary art and architectural preservation. On the one hand, the study draws on art theory that has been informed, since the 1990s, by socially led and participatory practices. On the other hand, it responds to recent changes in conservation charters emphasizing the role of local communities and of creative agents acting outside traditional institutions. The mutual theoretical turn toward local, communal and collective values inspired my retrospective analysis of the relationship between artistic work and the preservation of cultural heritage.
I reexamine artists’ interventions at three Palestinian sites, during three intervals that span Israel’s history - Ein Hawd, Wadi Salib and Kufr Bir’im – as key examples of sites-in-conflict where artistic actions can be read retrospectively as preservation. In such sites of intractable national conflict, almost exclusive weight is given to the national heritage of the sovereign power in order to forge a hegemonic form of collective memory – in this case the Jewish heritage – at the expense of minority groups that claim their heritage on the same territory, as the Palestinians in Israel. Within this complexity, artists involved with spatial and social practices use their toolbox to perform subversive actions and manage to promote the cultural heritage preservation in those sites. I argue that by turning to the modus operandi of art practices, the creative agents have managed to fathom the multilayered history of the sites and offer an alternative mode of preservation and commemoration. I interpret their art interventions as acts of preservation, and argue that because art is not bound by the rigid protocol of architectural preservation, it is able to identify fissures in the official practice through which critical voices can emerge. Preservation, in this light, becomes a civic act.

Exhibition Catalog Texts by Dr. Irit Carmon Popper

Legend for reading the exhibition text (Or, Don’t go back, do cast doubt), 2023

Legend for reading the exhibition text (Or, Don’t go back, do cast doubt) I. City center in a clo... more Legend for reading the exhibition text (Or, Don’t go back, do cast doubt)
I. City center in a closet
Lack of clarity and disorientation, or in other words, liquidity and continuums between spaces/fields/realms is the very core of the exhibition City center in a closet. It is based on the recognition and insight into the state of affairs characterized by areas leaking into each other everywhere at all times. Tamar Shaeffer attempts to reflect this existential situation in her exhibition. This is the situation in which she finds herself becoming lost and trying to forge through. By using forms and materials categorized as belonging to different colliding and opposed spheres, she creates a concentrated space of shifts away from the familiar in which the feeling of disorientation makes it difficult for viewers to locate themselves. The familiar functional objects lack a comprehensible spatial division and there is no known functional distinction. On the surface, they may be identified, as may their usual usage, but the slight shifts, almost offhanded distortions in their placement and connection to other objects facilitate an experience of interpretive reading, in their attempt to reorganize what is being read as we gaze upon them.

Amphibia , 2023

Amphibia is the ability to live and function in both water and on land, an ability shared by amph... more Amphibia is the ability to live and function in both water and on land, an ability shared by amphibians, mythological figures, and certain types of weapons. The duality rooted in the biological term is translated by Aysha E Arar into a duality of the imaginations and reality that define her life. Water is home to the imagination, freedom, motion, and creativity, and stands in stark opposition to the limitations and prohibitions of the land. This dual preoccupation reveals her dealings with the inherent conflict between tradition and progress, collective and individual identity, and life in the domestic and familial realm as opposed to self-fulfillment, which characterizes women in traditional Muslim societies.
A total sense of amphibia is conveyed to the exhibition space via a hoard of expressive, manneristic images in strong colors and monochrome. The support and size change: a range of papers and canvases, from notebooks and painting pads to canvases, maps, or screens; items collected from the street, and types of branches. The support is full of fantastic figures in constant battle, dizzy in eternal movement, seeping and merging, slipping away and evading, moving between human proportions to hybrids of humans and animals, male and female, predator and prey – temptation and terror working in tandem.
The Muslim feminist symbol is apparent in both worlds, the everyday and the fantastic. She is also Anderson’s Little Mermaid, who gave up her voice for a pair of legs, and the female voice that acts as fatal weapon in the Sirens’ Song. A symbol dealing with the religious prohibition of female singing in contrast with the never-ending passion for creation. The artist presents her everyday life as an allegory, seeking to add it to a visual reservoir that crosses through spaces, times, and religions.

Dada and Its Later Manifestations in the Geographic Margins Israel, Romania, Poland, and North America, Apr 17, 2024

This volume focuses on the unstudied geographic margins of Dada, delving into the roots of Dada i... more This volume focuses on the unstudied geographic margins of Dada, delving into the roots of Dada in Israel, Romania, Poland, and North America. Contributors consider some of the practices and experiments that were conceived a century ago, surfaced in art throughout the twentieth century, and are still relevant today. Unearthing its Israeli origins, examining Dadaist expressions in Poland, and shedding light on overlooked facets of Dadaist art in Romania and North America, the authors cast a spotlight on the less-explored geographical peripheries of Dada. The book is organized around four thematic trajectories—space, language, materiality, and reception—which are dissected through the lens of micro-histories. Recognizing the continuing validity of questions raised by Dadaist artists, this volume argues that Dada persists as an ongoing endeavor—a continual reexamination of the fundamental tenets of art and its ever-evolving potential manifestations.

PART I: Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries
Paper 3. Through the Eyes of an Architect, the Soul of an Artist: Marcel Janco and Ein Hod Artist Colony | Irit Carmon Popper
Dada artist and architect, Marcel Janco, prevented the demolishing of the Palestinian village of Ein Hawd after the 1948 war. He succeeded in restoring the village, and establishing the Ein Hod artist colony. We offer a new perspective to this seminal story, rooting Janco’s praxis as an Israeli planning official in his earlier 1920s avant-garde circles. In Zurich Janco worked with Dadaist methods of readymade, disunity and collage that were inspired by the non-European Other. After the Great War, he participated in reconstructing destroyed towns in Northern France according to regionalist principles. Back in Bucharest, he practiced ‘Soft Modern’ architecture, reminiscent of the empiricist attitude of the arts and crafts. This reputation legitimized his oppositional ideology, allowing him to undermine Israeli institutional treatment of Arab architecture.
The paper retrospectively interprets Janco’s mobilization of artists to rehabilitate the houses and urban fabric of the village through the lens of contemporary theories. It identifies in the collectives he assembled acts of participatory art that resulted in preserving an ideal type of a Palestinian village. While activating a yet unknown toolbox of preservation, his radical position vis-à-vis state institution and his successful rehabilitation project also entails a civic negation and reappropriation of the Palestinian other that was expelled inland.

Palestinians call Israel’s Independence the Nakba, i.e., the catastrophe that drove them out of t... more Palestinians call Israel’s Independence the Nakba, i.e., the catastrophe that drove them out of their homes, destroyed their villages, expropriated their land, and denied their right to return. This paper focuses on the impressive remains of two villages - Ayn Hawd and Kufr Birim - in order to examine how Israeli and Palestinian artists, by means of their disciplinary operations, intervened in preserving physical edifices or suppressed narratives. The first is Ayn Hawd, on whose remains of which Marcel Janco, a famous Jewish Dada artist, established an artists’ colony. He prevented the destruction of the village, restored and reused it, yet was also involved in its dispossession. The second is Kufr Birim – a closed military zone situated in a national park – where Palestinian artists perform, regularly yet temporarily, site specific art interventions. They belong to a larger group of activists who renovate the church and perform religious, educational and cultural events in situ. In both cases, the artistic actions advanced an oppositional ideology within the dominant institutional apparatus that safeguarded the minority heritage. We propose to examine how art intervention deciphers the site through a different toolkit, and thus succeeds to expand the boundaries of preservation and approximates towards an experimental practice. Can preservation select its addressees? And if so, can we still consider it an act of preservation? The paper challenges the dominant practice with an alternative approach to transcultural heritage, based on interdisciplinary research tying together contemporary art theories, architectural heritage and political philosophy of sites in conflict.

Premio Bruno Zevi per un saggio storico-critico sull’architettura. © LetteraVentidue Edizioni, 2021

The paper reexamines the village of Ein Hawd, which unlike most Arab villages, was not demolished... more The paper reexamines the village of Ein Hawd, which unlike most Arab villages, was not demolished by the Jewish authorities in the 1950s, arguably thanks to the intervention of Marcel Janco, a well-known Dada artist and a modern architect by training, who established the Ein Hod artist colony on the village remains. Janco restored the village and reused it, yet was also involved in its dispossession. I propose to investigate the establishment of the artist colony as inspired by Janco's past practices in the avant-garde circles of the early 20th century. The paper seeks to reveal the intertwining of those practices as a single act motivated by Janco’s background, enabling him to produce a new sense of identity while appropriating another. Janco used Dadaist methods of readymade, disunity and collage, inspired by the non-European cultural Other. He was also inspired by collective and collaborative actions by artists motivated by social change. In the interwar period, he took part in the Grande Reconstruction in the destroyed towns of northern France, which were restored according to regionalist principles. Afterwards, back in Bucharest, he practiced “soft modern” architecture – a moderate practice reminiscent of the empiricist attitude of turn-of-the-century arts and crafts.
In the aftermath of the 1948 war in Israel/Palestine, his avant-garde background allowed him, now an active agent of the state planning apparatus, to promote an oppositional ideology and undermine institutional modes of thinking on the preservation of Arab architecture. I examine how artists intervened in preserving structures or suppressed narratives of sites-in-conflict and propose to interpret their interventions as acts of preservation, as
they undermined the supremacy of top-down national heritage agenda. The research questions the acceptance
of contemporary artistic intervention within the political system, destabilizing institutional modes of thinking, and
how poetical visionary art relates to the ethical issues involved.
The research challenges the boundaries of art and architecture discourses with an interdisciplinary approach combining contemporary art and architectural preservation. It proposes an innovative methodology that applies a social practice discourse – relational aesthetics, participatory art and collaborative art theories – to analyze retrospectively artistic modes of action as creative agents that unsettle the boundaries of the heritage policy and promotes an alternative model. This analysis seeks to expand the boundaries of the discourse of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict by challenging common narratives about historical events such as the Ein Hawd/Hod story from a contemporary perspective.

YOUR WAY OR MY WAY? Questions on Authenticity, Identity and Patrimonial Proceedings in the Safeguarding of Architectural Heritage Created in the Meeting of Cultures, 2017

Palestinians call Israel’s Independence the Nakba, i.e., the catastrophe that drove them out of t... more Palestinians call Israel’s Independence the Nakba, i.e., the catastrophe that drove them out of their homes, destroyed their villages, expropriated their land, and denied their right to return. This paper focuses on the impressive remains of two villages - Ayn Hawd and Kufr Birim - in order to examine how Israeli and Palestinian artists, by means of their disciplinary operations, intervened in preserving physical edifices or suppressed narratives.
The first is Ayn Hawd, on whose remains of which Marcel Janco, a famous Jewish Dada artist, established an artists’ colony. He prevented the destruction of the village, restored and reused it, yet was also involved in its dispossession. The second is Kufr Birim – a closed military zone situated in a national park – where Palestinian artists perform, regularly yet temporarily, site specific art interventions. They belong to a larger group of activists who renovate the church and perform religious, educational and cultural events in situ. In both cases, the artistic actions advanced an oppositional ideology within the dominant institutional apparatus that safeguarded the minority heritage.
We propose to examine how art intervention deciphers the site through a different toolkit, and thus succeeds to expand the boundaries of preservation and approximates towards an experimental practice. Can preservation select its addressees? And if so, can we still consider it an act of preservation? The paper challenges the dominant practice with an alternative approach to transcultural heritage, based on interdisciplinary research tying together contemporary art theories, architectural heritage and political philosophy of sites in conflict.

Future Anterior , 2018

Bar'am national park in Israel contains both the remains of an ancient synagogue and the ruins o... more Bar'am national park in Israel contains both the remains of an ancient synagogue and the ruins of a Palestinian village. The architecture of the synagogue is restored as the central structure of the park, while the remains of the Palestinian village – a closed military area - are restricted and neglected. The existing architectural fabric on site does not reflect a consolidated agenda of preservation, but rather a political policy of occupation and discrimination by turning the history of demolition of the agrarian Palestinian land into a seemingly pacified site of national heritage. The village descendants are allowed to enter for ephemeral activities, which they use to perform social and artistic activities on site.
The study examines a series of site-specific installations of a contemporary artist and architect, a descendant of the villagers, on site. Through their inherent impermanence and non-recurring characteristics, the art interventions succeed to break through the fixed boundaries of the dominant heritage and allow hidden layers to surface. We analyze the art practices in light of recent preservation theory. In the context of an intractable national conflict, we further argue, such participatory action opens venues to discuss preservation as an act of civil rights, which challenges the official history as an alternative creative-performative model of preserving heritage.

PhD Dissertation, 2019

Dissertation Summary The dissertation explores Israeli artists, both Jewish and Palestinian, who ... more Dissertation Summary
The dissertation explores Israeli artists, both Jewish and Palestinian, who have intervened in preserving the physical remains and suppressed narratives of depopulated Palestinian sites. The residents of these villages and urban quarters were deported by the military forces of the Jewish population during the post-partition war of 1948. The war that culminated in the declaration of the State of Israel and the Nakba of the Palestinians, transformed the physical and human landscape of Mandate Palestine. During and after the war Israeli officials wished to ruin the evacuated architectural environments, yet various artists used the materiality of the sites as a platform for interventions, for promoting the preservation of the vernacular architecture and for evoking its suppressed meanings.
Scholars have studied these sites through the lenses of geography, anthropology, political science, and art history, but this study offers an alternative approach by shifting the conceptual lens onto some reciprocal insights in the fields of contemporary art and architectural preservation. On the one hand, the study draws on art theory that has been informed, since the 1990s, by socially led and participatory practices. On the other hand, it responds to recent changes in conservation charters emphasizing the role of local communities and of creative agents acting outside traditional institutions. The mutual theoretical turn toward local, communal and collective values inspired my retrospective analysis of the relationship between artistic work and the preservation of cultural heritage.
I reexamine artists’ interventions at three Palestinian sites, during three intervals that span Israel’s history - Ein Hawd, Wadi Salib and Kufr Bir’im – as key examples of sites-in-conflict where artistic actions can be read retrospectively as preservation. In such sites of intractable national conflict, almost exclusive weight is given to the national heritage of the sovereign power in order to forge a hegemonic form of collective memory – in this case the Jewish heritage – at the expense of minority groups that claim their heritage on the same territory, as the Palestinians in Israel. Within this complexity, artists involved with spatial and social practices use their toolbox to perform subversive actions and manage to promote the cultural heritage preservation in those sites. I argue that by turning to the modus operandi of art practices, the creative agents have managed to fathom the multilayered history of the sites and offer an alternative mode of preservation and commemoration. I interpret their art interventions as acts of preservation, and argue that because art is not bound by the rigid protocol of architectural preservation, it is able to identify fissures in the official practice through which critical voices can emerge. Preservation, in this light, becomes a civic act.

Legend for reading the exhibition text (Or, Don’t go back, do cast doubt), 2023

Legend for reading the exhibition text (Or, Don’t go back, do cast doubt) I. City center in a clo... more Legend for reading the exhibition text (Or, Don’t go back, do cast doubt)
I. City center in a closet
Lack of clarity and disorientation, or in other words, liquidity and continuums between spaces/fields/realms is the very core of the exhibition City center in a closet. It is based on the recognition and insight into the state of affairs characterized by areas leaking into each other everywhere at all times. Tamar Shaeffer attempts to reflect this existential situation in her exhibition. This is the situation in which she finds herself becoming lost and trying to forge through. By using forms and materials categorized as belonging to different colliding and opposed spheres, she creates a concentrated space of shifts away from the familiar in which the feeling of disorientation makes it difficult for viewers to locate themselves. The familiar functional objects lack a comprehensible spatial division and there is no known functional distinction. On the surface, they may be identified, as may their usual usage, but the slight shifts, almost offhanded distortions in their placement and connection to other objects facilitate an experience of interpretive reading, in their attempt to reorganize what is being read as we gaze upon them.

Amphibia , 2023

Amphibia is the ability to live and function in both water and on land, an ability shared by amph... more Amphibia is the ability to live and function in both water and on land, an ability shared by amphibians, mythological figures, and certain types of weapons. The duality rooted in the biological term is translated by Aysha E Arar into a duality of the imaginations and reality that define her life. Water is home to the imagination, freedom, motion, and creativity, and stands in stark opposition to the limitations and prohibitions of the land. This dual preoccupation reveals her dealings with the inherent conflict between tradition and progress, collective and individual identity, and life in the domestic and familial realm as opposed to self-fulfillment, which characterizes women in traditional Muslim societies.
A total sense of amphibia is conveyed to the exhibition space via a hoard of expressive, manneristic images in strong colors and monochrome. The support and size change: a range of papers and canvases, from notebooks and painting pads to canvases, maps, or screens; items collected from the street, and types of branches. The support is full of fantastic figures in constant battle, dizzy in eternal movement, seeping and merging, slipping away and evading, moving between human proportions to hybrids of humans and animals, male and female, predator and prey – temptation and terror working in tandem.
The Muslim feminist symbol is apparent in both worlds, the everyday and the fantastic. She is also Anderson’s Little Mermaid, who gave up her voice for a pair of legs, and the female voice that acts as fatal weapon in the Sirens’ Song. A symbol dealing with the religious prohibition of female singing in contrast with the never-ending passion for creation. The artist presents her everyday life as an allegory, seeking to add it to a visual reservoir that crosses through spaces, times, and religions.