Seven Jacquard-woven wool tapestries, from 170 × 50 cm to 300 × 175 cm, made with TextielLab, TextielMuseum Tilburg, during a residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.
These woven tapestries serve as portals, mirrors, ruminations, sites of contemplation, depicting events from the Battle of Karbala. They carry symbols from the battle while searching for parallels with the historical landscapes of Karbala, Najaf and even Damascus, where traces of Mesopotamian history still linger.
The Battle of Karbala has always been depicted with a plethora of fantastical divine presence and supernatural moments: the blood of the martyred infant rising to the sky, angels flying above the battlefield, the skies turning dark at the moment of Imam Hussein’s death, like an eclipse or some cosmic mourning. Alongside these, I allowed myself to speculate on moments charged with a magical essence. One such moment is when Saida Zaynab spoke, and for an instant those around her saw her mother Fatima reflected in her. From this came a figure with two faces.
In the aftermath of the battle and the martyrdom of her family, Saida Zaynab (a.s.) was ridiculed and asked by her oppressors, “How did you experience the death of your family?” She replied:
I saw nothing but beauty.
Her brother Hussein ibn Ali (a.s.) was murdered, decapitated, and his lifeless body mutilated. Yet her words, spoken in the face of unimaginable cruelty, resonate across centuries. The beauty she saw lies beyond the physical realm and its events. For her, Karbala and the martyrdom of her family reflected unwavering faith in the face of overwhelming agony and injustice, a testimony to the prevalence of ultimate justice and truth.
Islamic art emphasises inwardness and abstraction, resisting representation. Arabic has no single word for abstraction; the artist understands it through the two closest words, التجريد (al-tajrīd), to strip away in search of the essence, and الروحانية (al-rūḥāniyya), to feel through the soul as a sensory way of experiencing. Abstraction is then not just a visual method but a means to reach the divine: rūḥāniyya is a felt presence rooted in the Heart (Qalb), the centre of perception, intention and divine encounter in Islamic thought. In carpets, calligraphy and pottery, beauty directs the tranquillity of contemplation in search of something. Carpets saturated with symbols and patterns, so densely packed that their intensity dissolves into abstraction, engage the viewer’s body, invoking empathy, rhythm and a physical response that goes beyond rational or symbolic interpretation.
The pixelation is driven less by aesthetic preference than by necessity. The research relies on second-hand sources, sometimes many generations removed, available only in such low quality that an accurate translation is not possible. Pixelation thus becomes a critical tool: it relinquishes the presumption of authenticity and opens a free space for imagination and interpretation.
The Battle of Karbala has always been depicted with a plethora of fantastical divine presence and supernatural moments: the blood of the martyred infant rising to the sky, angels flying above the battlefield, the skies turning dark at the moment of Imam Hussein’s death, like an eclipse or some cosmic mourning. Alongside these, I allowed myself to speculate on moments charged with a magical essence. One such moment is when Saida Zaynab spoke, and for an instant those around her saw her mother Fatima reflected in her. From this came a figure with two faces.
In the aftermath of the battle and the martyrdom of her family, Saida Zaynab (a.s.) was ridiculed and asked by her oppressors, “How did you experience the death of your family?” She replied:
I saw nothing but beauty.
Her brother Hussein ibn Ali (a.s.) was murdered, decapitated, and his lifeless body mutilated. Yet her words, spoken in the face of unimaginable cruelty, resonate across centuries. The beauty she saw lies beyond the physical realm and its events. For her, Karbala and the martyrdom of her family reflected unwavering faith in the face of overwhelming agony and injustice, a testimony to the prevalence of ultimate justice and truth.
Islamic art emphasises inwardness and abstraction, resisting representation. Arabic has no single word for abstraction; the artist understands it through the two closest words, التجريد (al-tajrīd), to strip away in search of the essence, and الروحانية (al-rūḥāniyya), to feel through the soul as a sensory way of experiencing. Abstraction is then not just a visual method but a means to reach the divine: rūḥāniyya is a felt presence rooted in the Heart (Qalb), the centre of perception, intention and divine encounter in Islamic thought. In carpets, calligraphy and pottery, beauty directs the tranquillity of contemplation in search of something. Carpets saturated with symbols and patterns, so densely packed that their intensity dissolves into abstraction, engage the viewer’s body, invoking empathy, rhythm and a physical response that goes beyond rational or symbolic interpretation.
The pixelation is driven less by aesthetic preference than by necessity. The research relies on second-hand sources, sometimes many generations removed, available only in such low quality that an accurate translation is not possible. Pixelation thus becomes a critical tool: it relinquishes the presumption of authenticity and opens a free space for imagination and interpretation.