Media

Projects and Media:

June 2022  FAMILY LINES - The Douglas Hyde gallery Dublin 

As part of the online screening program and exhibition Family Lines I will be showing my first short film exploring my mixed Egyptian English family heritages, and mixed race identity. FAMILY LINES is a multi-platform project by artist Alice Rekab in collaboration with Éireann and I: A community archive for Black migrants in Ireland, and with contributions from Holly Graham, Salma Ahmad Caller, Larry Achiampong, and Cypher Billboard, London.  The project explores experiences of migration and survival within the family unit, and focuses on Black and Mixed-Race life in Ireland across generations.

https://thedouglashyde.ie/event/salma-ahmad-caller-shell-fables/

https://thedouglashyde.ie/family-lines-project/

February 2022 FORMS OF MIGRATION - AGYA funded edited collection by Falschrum Books Berlin

My chapter Crossing Formations, a performative text/image work, is part of a groundbreaking book of essays and art exploring emerging aesthetic forms as responses to cross-cultural encounters and experiences of artists and writers living in places other than where they were born. Finding new ways to understand “im/migrant”, from literal to more figurative ideas of political and aesthetic exile grounded in examinations of race, gender, sexuality, coloniality. https://www.falschrum.org/forms-of-migration.html

https://www.salmaahmadcaller.com/formsofmigrationcrossingformationsberlin

November 2021 The Crossing Cabinet - Exhibition KW Institute Berlin

This conceptual curiosity cabinet of photography, projection and text works was devised as a continuation of and introduction to Crossing Formations – of the Things and their tales - exploring identity, possessions and notions of collecting and archives and where the political and private, the global and the personal/familial meet, collide and elide.  You can see more at the hashtag thecrossingcabinet on instagram.

February 2022 Art of the Postcard: We Are All Artists presented by Inverted Syntax at Firehouse Arts Centre - A group exhibition Colorado USA - showing my Seven Cautionary Tales - 7 collages on postcards. 

January 2022 Lockedown Locked In - International Digital film - Commission to create six collage works on paper to be used in a digital film created by Turkish director Baris Celiloglu . An international women’s digital project on domestic abuse during lockdown across UK, Australia, Turkey and Russia. 

July - September 2021 Cladogram: 2nd KMA International Juried Biennial Katonah Museum of Art New York - International group exhibition exploring family histories, the archive and marginalised histories.

Juried by Yasmeen Siddiqui of Minerva Projects

I will be exhibiting a photographic work Golden Ghaziyya: Golden Conqueror - In this work you can see a 19th century colonial postcard from Egypt, of a woman who appears to be a Ghawazi dancer. The projected image of light filtering through a traditional carved window screen evokes Islamic and Ottoman histories of Egypt. A golden tassel, like those on the dancer’s skirt, is like golden hair falling into the frame, the presence of an outsider, the Orientalist gaze, my mother or even myself. The belly of my mother’s Egyptian glass perfume bottle curves in to the right. My process of photographing such postcards taken during the British occupation of Egypt, and overlaying mood, light, shadow, and inserting objects relating to personal family histories, draws attention to the constructed nature of the colonial postcard, it’s flatness, and points to multiple histories erased by the colonial lens, whilst also evoking imagined lives beyond the edges and expressing the role of Empire in my Egyptian father and English mother’s lives, and in the elusiveness of my mixed-race identity. 

Recently ended: Model ‘21 part 1 of the annual members show 6th May - 31st May 2021 Studio 1.1 London

Art theoretical essay for the book "Broken Time Machines: Daisy Patton" published by Minerva Projects 2021:

Drawing on my multi-cultural heritage and a background in medicine, pharmacology and anthropology of art, I use the lenses of cross-cultural aesthetics and cognitive science to investigate the meanings of ornament and embodiment in Patton’s work in my essay Ornamental Feeling: The Body of Life and Death in the work of Daisy Patton.

Minerva Projects & Press supports artists and curators who embody minority histories, religions and social conditions.

https://minervaprojects.org/exhibitions/

https://minervaprojects.org/books/broken-time-machine-daisy-patton/

Digital International Film: Lockedown Locked In - 8 collage / projection works Autumn 2021:

Commission to create eight collage works on paper to be used in a digital film created by Turkish director and actress Baris Celiloglu for release Autumn 2021. An international women’s digital project on domestic abuse during lockdown. The film is being produced by teams of women actresses, artists, video artists and writers across Turkey, UK, Russia and Australia. For this project I used a mixture of projection, collage on paper, and drawing to create digital images for use within the film.

https://theatreeastnbull.com/en/productions/lockedown-locked-in/

American University Dubai Indelible Literary Journal Indelible Evenings 3: On Ekphrasis: The Dialogue between Poetry and Painting October 2020 :

Beautiful Ruptures: Breaking Bodies Breaking Boundaries December 2020:

I was invited by Lidija Kostic Khachatourian to write a conceptual essay/review. Drawing together threads and ideas of cross-cultural mixing, European notions of curiosity and wonder, colonialism, Afrofuturism, the relationship between Africa and the Caribbean, I explore these ideas manifest in The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey and The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, and also drawing on Marina Warner’s Fantastic Metamorphosis, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling The Self, and Neetu Khanna’s The Visceral Logics of Decolonization.

https://artandaboutafrica.com/opinion/beautiful-ruptures-breaking-bodies-breaking-boundaries/

Sudan Retold: An Art Book About the History and Future of Sudan - book review July 2020:

Edited by Larissa-Diana Fuhrmann and Khalid Wad Albaih, for Nahla Ink and Art and About Africa online journals. I was invited to write a text to show how complex culturally embodied knowledge is transmitted in resistance to and in spite of colonial, patriarchal, racial and other hierarchical oppressive modes.

https://nahlaink.com/category/reviews/

Art Uncovered BTRtoday New York, Kimberly Ruth - artist interview June 2020:

Interview about how my project Making The Postcard Womens Imaginarium is working to create an ongoing network of women artists, writers and practitioners who will use various aesthetic forms to unpick colonial and racial narratives behind representations of women on 19th century postcards, with the aim of replacing toxic narratives with lost or marginalised histories and voices of women from the MENA region. On How Ariella Azoulay’s concept of Cocitizenship is influencing this project and on responding to anti- black racism.

https://www.btrtoday.com/listen/artuncovered/salma-ahmad-caller-and-jalilah- jackman/

The Beloved’s Eye - on finding postcard women. Inverted Syntax Print Issue Two - creative non-fiction writing and photography February 2020:

Photographic works and creative non-fiction text drawing on Sufi notions of divine love and inspiration, and the addictive gaze upon the ‘other’ that is in fact yourself, in searching for and finding complex syncretic and fluid identities behind images of colonial postcard women. Inverted syntax is a bi-annual independent art and literary journal published online and in print. It is a platform for hybrid and unorthodox approaches to form and aesthetics.

https://www.invertedsyntax.com/store/p4/print-issue.html

New Landscapes Anthology, Lungs Project, book - five poems December 2019:

Five poems published in this collection of thirteen up-and-coming international poets. ‘Filtered through the lens of intersectionality, the book contains a distillation of our cumulative experiences as womxn of colour’. Lungs Project are a non-profit arts organisation and small press founded in 2016 by a group of Black women and femmes of colour who are passionate about supporting and promoting up-and-coming creatives.

https://www.lungsproject.org/publications/new-landscapes-anthology

Throwing light, casting doubt, telling tales: Making The Postcard Womens Imaginarium - concept / group curation / group exhibition in London October 2019:

I created and set up the project called Making The Postcard Womens Imaginarium in August 2018 exploring colonial representations of Middle Eastern women on 19th century postcards. I curated the group exhibition for phase 1. The project has entered a second phase as a larger multi-artist project bringing together women artists from the MENA region exploring colonialism, Orientalism, racism, including anti-black racism in the Middle East, and representations of women. I have invited Libyan-British architect/curator Najlaa Elageli and Iranian-British artist Afsoon to co-curate this second phase with me.

‘Speechless’ - Installation. Remind Me To Remember - Group exhibition July 2018 OpenHand OpenSpace Gallery, Brock Keep:

A sound and image installation within an old Victorian prison cell, that was more recently a women’s bathroom, and then gallery. Exploring the memory of the woman’s body as a ‘room’ speaking, in alternative ways, having been silenced. An investigation of the relationship of personal and private memory to wider social and political memory, cross--generational memory/trauma, and colonial memory.

‘A Cultured Mahomedan’ - Sculpture. Two Lilies for Oscar Wilde 2017/2018:

Sculptural work for a large group show at Reading Museum, Lilies for Oscar Wilde. Two conceptual lilies exploring notions of beauty and ornament and the colonial gaze using imagery from Oscar Wilde’s play Salome.

Teaching art and cross cultural perspectives. December 2011 - March 2015

Adult art education officer, Pitt Rivers Museum – teaching cross cultural perspectives, introducing the collections, running workshops working with Oxford community groups to make collections accessible, teaching about art of other cultures and running arts awards sessions with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Working closely with Oxford Brookes and the Artist Teacher MA scheme to deliver an Interpretation full day workshop on engaging with objects from other cultures in the Pitt Rivers Museum collections.

Working with artists of international repute and with artists from the Royal College of Art, assisting them on how to engage creatively with objects of other cultures in the collections.

Designing and curating courses and workshop series for MA students and the MA Artist Teacher scheme at Oxford Brooks: Body and Beyond: Constructing and Transcending the Human Form

Education:

Masters in Art History (Distinction), The Open University 2010

Postgraduate Diploma in Art History (Distinction), The Open University 2009

Bachelor of Pharmacy (First Class Honours with Distinction), University of Bath 1993. AAH prize for outstanding student at Bath University awarded in 1993. Pfizer prize for Pharmacology awarded in 1992.