Forms of Migration Berlin 2021/2022 Crossing Formations

Crossing Formations - my image and text work exploring migrations and identity is being published in February 2022 as part of an AGYA funded project and book - Forms of Migration by Falschrum Books Berlin

AGYA funded project and book Forms of Migration - ten photographic collage works and creative non-fiction

February 2022 edited by Stefan Maneval and Jennifer Reimer, published by Falschrum Books in Berlin

Please DM Stefan Maneval on Instagram at Falschrum Books to pre-order your copy of this beautiful and groundbreaking collection - with contributions from Piotr Gwiazda, James Nguyen, Karolina Golimowska, Enaya Hammad Othman, Stefan Maneval, Jennifer Reimer, Chaza Charafeddine, Reine Chahine, Lisa Marchi, Matthias Pasdzierny, Silvia Schultermandl, Susanne Rieser, Omer Alkin, Salma Ahmad Caller, Stephanie Misa, Don E. Walicek, Anne Quema, Ikram Hili, Karen Tei Yamashita , Wendy Shaw

“A rich collection of texts, visual material, essays, photography, interviews and poetry by excellent authors and artists from all around the globe !! “ Stefan Maneval

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.

At the end of 2021 the contributors to Forms of Migration assembled for an exciting 3 day workshop The Circus At The End of Time and exhibition where I was able to meet the other book contributors and show some new conceptual work in an installation called the Crossing Cabinet.

*crossings = places for meetings that lead to detractions, erasures, additions, multiplications, intensifications, conflict, dialogue, confusion, departures, crossing over, moving past, crossed, star-crossed, cross-eyed, at the sign of the cross, crossroads ...

In 2020 following the death of my mother, I spent the summer months sorting and clearing my parents home, including all my father’s possessions there since his death in 1996. As part of this process I began to collect and curate old photographs and objects that seemed to be auratic, embodying the migrations and journeys across East and West, of my parents, Egyptian father and English mother, from Cairo to Oxford and from Oxford to Cairo, and my own journeys from Mosul Iraq to Kano Nigeria and from there to Saudi Arabia and finally landing in the UK in 1990.

All these crossings and criss-crossings occurred not only in the physical geographical space /time but also in the geopolitical, the psychological and emotional spaces of migrations, and within the memory-body, of my parents lives and my own life. It is in those intangible spaces of memory, the bodily senses, the imaginary, the fictional and the emotional and psychological that I find the richest and most profound residues of cross-cultural meetings, migrations. The travels out from oneself and one’s original place, outwards to meet an unknown ‘Other’.

I started to photograph assemblages of objects and possessions in pairings or groupings that seemed to be in a kind of dialogue with each other, speaking of cultural differences, oppositions, and yet brought together surprisingly and eccentrically. My mother’s collection of china figurines with my father’s Arabic and Islamic books. My mother’s sewing and my father’s reading. An evil eye charm, silver and blue, from Istanbul. My father bought it from Istanbul for my mother. His grandmother, my great grandmother was Turkish. She lived in Cairo during the Ottoman Empire era. The journeys and migrations over decades now only found as traces and detritus of lives lived, found in the objects and possessions left within the space of the family home, my home and in my memory. Each seemingly insignificant object loaded with significances and meanings, many hands pointing to threads and webs of peoples over generations crossing over, crossing over within me.

For the Forms of Migration project /book I created ten photographic collage works ‘The Crossing Tales’ using the photographic works that I had created during the summer of 2020. I also wrote a kind of catalogue or museum log/inventory of 61 short texts for each of the most significant objects used in creating The Crossing Tales. The tales, the inventory and addendum work together in a performative way that is structured to create movement. The texts and images are fragmented fragments that are part of a cyclical whole, an ouroboros, that must keep falling apart, dissolving and reforming, creating crossings and new formations of meanings and connections that are always flowing. Never still, complete or solid. Porous and multiple. Text and image merge.

A bewildering network of correspondences and juxtapositions, where the viewer/reader/performer is compelled to dance about back and forth, matching tales to objects, wholes to parts, where all ‘wholes’ are in fact still parts. I wanted to create a work that involved more than reading a text and looking at images. One requiring effort and play, a somewhat mind-blowing enigmatic identity game, where what is or was ‘real’ and physical has dissolved into the body of memory. 

*crossings = places for meetings that lead to detractions, erasures, additions, multiplications, intensifications, conflict, dialogue, confusion, departures, crossing over, moving past, crossed, star-crossed, cross-eyed, at the sign of the cross, crossroads ...