Aya Haidar: The Translator’s Thread
From memory to story, a subtle process of embroidering the image
Aya Haidar, Recollections (Seamstress series) VII (2011); Al Balad XII (2012), Embroidery on printed linen. Courtesy of the artist.
With text by Rania Jaber.
Aya Haidar’s journey into the materiality of stories comes from her family archive of oral histories. She grew up in London, close to her grandmother who recounted stories about Lebanon while teaching her how to sew and knit. In her artwork, the artist uses embroidery not only for its symbolic and labour intensive technique but also because it is a feminist tool and a large part of women’s history. Haidar believes in sharing narratives that are passed on to different generations through stitching. A practice that was once relegated as “craft”, she claims, "stitching projected women onto the expressionist stage. With that it gave them a voice”.
Seamstress (2011) is a series of photographs taken by Haidar on one of her frequent trips to Beirut. Although she has never lived there, she continuously moves back and forth between her two cities, Beirut and London. The series began during a trip to the market of a different city, when the artist lived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In search of fabric for her work, she stumbled upon the old town — Al Balad series—rich with beautiful architecture and houses that echoed those of Beirut’s Ottoman period. She was drawn to the stories lingering on the walls, behind the facades, and in the very structures of the buildings. This interest in photographing and documenting old buildings continued with the same intensity when returning to Beirut, as she walked around the city, snapping photos of places, corners and buildings that caught her attention.
The images she recreates rely on her physical involvement and not just her discerning eye. “These buildings tell a story just like my grandma does, just like my father does, they are visual remnants of a past.” Yet, underneath the façade, rests a visceral longing to turn these material objects into something almost immaterial. Haidar pulls the threads loose from the building’s symbolism and stitches her interpretation through the image. After taking a series of photographs, she selects several images that she prints onto linen and begins to embroider.
The buildings she chooses are usually iconic, historical, colonial ruins or simply structures that had once been witness to the many events that unfolded at a disconnected moment in the past. Haidar claims that there is an element of “self-healing” in the process of adopting a technique and applying it to images she has heard stories about. Each suture translates this feeling of mending and piecing together ruptures of both past and present. The materiality of the photograph is juxtaposed with the durational quality of the embroidered act. Using bright colours, she threads some of the bullet holes in the statue of Martyrs Square in Seamstress V, while in Seamstress XVIII, she uses yellow and orange thread to sew over the supporting pillars of St. Georges Hotel in Beirut.
The symbolic histories of the St. Georges Hotel and the Martyr’s Square statue in Beirut are both loaded with cultural and political histories of their own. They do, however, become a translation through embroidery, creating an after-life in another context especially for audiences who have no connection to these historical structures. Yet, through the process of embroidery, they are interpreted into an almost fictive rendering. Haidar is drawn to the layers of colonial, violent, and timely histories of each building, which for her tell stories similar to those her grandmother once told. These buildings are also “visual signs of remnants” of a past that she had once seen in her grandmother’s archive. What Haidar brings to each image is a retelling that she translates with thread. This allows her to transform “context” into both the textile and the textual, creating a new take on the adage to “weave a tale”. According to Tim Ingold (2007) “threads may be transformed into traces and traces into threads”. Once the thread passes through the image, a new surface is formed from the repetitive movement, creating a trace of a distant memory or a patchwork of reconstructed surfaces across the canvas.