YUMNA AL-ARASHI, ‘Aisha’
AISHA
Size: 16.5 x 23.2 cm
Pages: 392
Published by Edition Patrick Frey, 2024
This powerful, delicate publication, inspired by Al-Arashi’s great-grandmother, Aisha, is an homage to the lineage of women that she descends from; women of the multidimensional and many-layered landscapes of the MENA region. Searching for an understanding of the tattoos that graced her great-grandmother’s body, Al-Arashi embraces the complexities of a symbolic matriarchal tradition. Unable to visit one of her places of origin, the war-stricken Yemen, Yumna traveled through Northern Africa meeting and photographing a diverse group of women belonging more or less to the same generation: all standing, sitting, looking, moving, and laughing with assuredness and joy. By refusing the violence of selection and definition surrounding women’s practices, Al-Arashi publishes every single photograph from her journey in this monograph, moving the work into an ethereal cinematic celebration.
Al-Arashi’s images are gentle yet strong in composition, conscientiously connecting the woman to the land surrounding her and vice versa; they are incredibly rich in detail and color; and they are intimate, beautifully defiant, and full of community and alliance. Aisha also includes Al-Arashi’s writing and poetry in which she reflects on memories of her great-grandmother and the scent of Oudh “that left a trail of magic wherever she floated in that home.” In her genre-stretching texts, Al-Arashi also speaks on colonial archives, intergenerational storytelling and the complexities of transnational female identity in patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist societies at large.