18 August 2024
Dearest Zainab,
As my sister Safa and I were rushing down Sydney Road — stuck behind the 19 tram in Brunswick — trying to make it to the last coffee shop open on a Sunday, she mentioned your cousin, Lina. How her visit in January felt like it had just happened, last month. At the mention of Lina, I was reminded of the afternoon we spent together in The Great Book Return, an archive of Palestinian literature and art I had curated. How, after going through the collection, you mentioned so casually the book you had made and titled after your jiddoo, Mohammed Salih Zaki. The book was an archive in itself, a collection of your family’s history, stories, memories, documents and many of your jiddoo’s paintings. At the heart of the book is a self-portrait of your jiddoo.
Although I’ve known you for three years, I didn’t know you had published your own book, let alone that your great-grandfather was a pioneering Iraqi artist, known as the ‘Sheikh of the Artists’. That his work is so foundational and treasured in Iraq that your grandmother had to smuggle his portrait out of Baghdad, hiding it between her clothes in her suitcase before it arrived in New Zealand. The incredible thing about fate is that its timing is always perfect, and on that day it just so happened that Lina, who had come to visit from Los Angeles and who had written the foreword to the book, had come with you to visit the archive. We spent the afternoon sitting together reading aloud, sharing stories about how the book about your jiddoo’s art had been made. At the end of your visit, you let me keep this precious text, an act of kindness I’m still in awe of.
Given how special that afternoon was, and how much I’ve learnt about your practice, please allow me to share with you a different perspective on how I have come to understand your work. You’ve said that your work was made when no written language could capture your feelings of loss, displacement, destruction and the inescapable passage of time. That it was a way for you to relinquish control and allow the process of art making to heal you or, at the very least, make sense of the world. You once told me that your work seeks to balance the subject and the object, likening it to two hands touching. Given this, I believe that despite your sentiments about loss and displacement – or perhaps because of it – your work creates connections and community. That the two hands you are bringing together are not just the materials and space but also your feelings of grief and connection.
Think about how your book developed from a need to document your family’s history, brought together your extended family from across the world. Not only within its pages, where your uncles, aunties and cousins wrote about their experiences and memories of your jiddoo’s work, but also in the exhibition opening. All at once, your family joined together to celebrate your jiddoo’s portrait and the book they had contributed to.
Think of your installation Here and There, two incandescent bulbs synchronised to the daytimes in Baghdad and Auckland, the two places you consider home. How at first the lights amplify and reveal how out of sync the two cities are and how a feeling of absence emerges from the disconnection between them. But as the rhythm of the two cities becomes clearer, there is a comfort in having the lights on, to knowing these places of home still exist.
I think about how your mum taught you to read and write Arabic, ensuring your family’s lineage and heritage would continue in a different home. How when you were dealing with feelings of things slipping and passing away from you, about the anxiety of missing out and losing time with the people you love, you made a clock. The Arabic numerals drawn from your memories of your mother’s daily Arabic lessons. How you titled the work Sha’ad’s clock — wakatna (our time), as an ode and gift to your friend: an object, with its fragments and impression of the diaspora, that connects you back to home. Is that not transformed? To connect the lineage your mum tried so hard to pass onto you, to be made into a clock figuring time. The very thing that will evade us all.
One of my favourite passages from your book was your aunt Ban describing how your jiddoo was known for giving his paintings away as presents to friends and relatives. As a result, your family has been constantly discovering new paintings by your jiddoo. It reminded me that, despite the distance of time and space, you hold his memory. I have carried your book — which you generously gifted me — every day, wrapped in a clear plastic covering and then placed in a zip lock bag to keep it safe. It gives me such joy and pride to be the guardian of such an object. To hold something so special.
Your works are living, transient and constantly transforming, giving you the unique ability to leave a trace or part of you wherever you go. I am reminded how that summer afternoon, our friendship transitioned. The sharing of your work, your family’s history and having Lina read aloud somehow broke through the three years of our acquaintanceship and cemented our friendship. Just like your works Zainab, you are in a constant state of connecting back to home.
مع السلام،
Anna Emina
