If I told you that my name should be spelt Istabraq but that at the borders of this country, those deciding the status of my family using a language which struggles to identify it, didn’t have patience enough to actually say.my.name…
Would you believe me?
Estabrak. It’s official. I mean, English tongues can say it.
Iss-tub-bruq is how it’s pronounced. And A rough silk only found in heaven is it’s meaning.
Sometimes I dream of ancient worlds where fruit and bombs have never mixed. Where family, love and freedom co-exist.
Where blurred lines of nourishment and destruction do not need to exist.
Where culture no longer negates safety. Sometimes, I dream of this.
Image info:
Estabrak // Ummi (meaning My Mother in Arabic) 2021/22 // Archival print under Acrylic Glass, mounted on Aluminum Dibond // Edition of 3
ABOUT: Another offering I’d like to share is of one of my most recent underwater images. It’s a self portrait, and one which was taken in a time of deep isolation and a work which also translates into other works I am currently exploring.
I’ve so much to say about pomegranates, their heritage and the importance of them in West Asia. The significance of it’s name and the body in which it expresses. There’s so much beauty and passion in this fruit, yet so much destruction attached to it.
For years I’ve noticed it’s presence in West Asian arts, yet it’s only been in isolation with internal conversations where I’ve found my relationship to it develop from one of a human eating fruit into a life lesson in history, language, colonisation and love.
Pomegranates have origins all over West and South West Asia, although it can specifically be traced back to Iran. Iran has huge significance to me as it was the place I was born, in exile after my family were forced to flee Iraq.
I’m going to go in more detail about the significance of pomegranates in a separate post which you can find in the research section of my studio, but for now I hope this offering can plant a seed of thought for you as much as it has for me.
The photograph and text were shared earliar this year via the Emeargeast exhibition ‘Dreaming Tomorrow’. And the image Ummi belongs to a current and ongoing multidisciplinary project called Letters To Ummi (Ummi meaning My Mother in Arabic). It is the first image in this series.
If you’ve landed here, I guess we may have something in common.. I too am curious to see what will come of this time and space spent with VITAL CAPACITIES.
Over the past couple years, so much has happened, is happening and about to bloom. For me and my practice, it’s been a phenomenally complex, difficult yet generous time of experimentation, of silence and of deeply personal work.
For anyone that knows me or of my practice, you’ll know that I’m intensely connected to understanding the ever evolving complexities of our human conditions. How it relates to our individual selves, to each other and in turn – to our environments.
Oh and I love water.
As I try to navigate the nuances of the vulnerability needed in my current line of work, the conflicting complexities of what to share and what to keep, I’d like to welcome those into this space with a small offering I wrote last year. One which carries the weight of so many other seeds planted across the diversity of my multi-sensory works and explorations.
The above text and image Dear Reader are from a series of works I have been exploring during & since lockdown called A Passing Place. This work was published in 0ct 2021 through Future Venture’s Radical Arts Handbook, Issue 03 – Radical Futures.
Thank you for spending some time here.
Homecoming; A Placeless Place / Folsktone Edition.
The above video is just a small taster of the Folkstone public’s contributions to the ongoing project HOMECOMING. I thought seeing a before and after would give good context for how the installation works in a public space.
During the ‘reveal’ event on July 3rd, I thought I had recording the almost 2hr conversation which took place amongst strangers when we all saw, for the first time, what was on these walls. Bare in mind before this no one had any UV lights so no1 knew what was being placed on the walls, where.
Unfortunately my audio device just didn’t record the whole conversation. So I invited some participants to share with me their reflections of the reveal event and here is one response:
It’s like you were afforded dignity’
——————————————————–
This specific social experiment is called ‘Homecoming; A Placeless Place’ and it is a touring participatory installation which has been asking since pre pandemic (2019+) ‘what does home mean to you?’
All languages are welcome, anything you wish to write, anywhere on the surfaces of these spaces.
Where to next?
HOMECOMING means allot to me. Each time I take it to a new space I am reminded of it’s importance, power and need for shared honest dialogues among strangers.
Above is an image of part of a wall inside DNA space in Folkstone. DNA space is the venue for this latest iteration of the project’s social experiment. The image reads multiple different contributions from the general public in Folkstone to the same question which has been asked since the beginning of HOMECOMING in 2019… “What does home mean to you?“
This section alone crosses so many realities…
Sometimes with this work, you are forced to stop. There is no doubt that in the moment which this section was revealed, that is the only thing I could do.
Some of these contributions are overlapping. And here is what some of them say::
home is the sea, which is a graveyard
There are so many people in this town who will never see their families again. They are finding homes with each other, and they will be moved.
To be at home is to be relaxed.
But I still love this place, almost.
G
O
H
O
M
E
my mum works in a profession known for taking people away from their families, it’s more complicated then that.
That last one got me. I cried when we did the group reveal on Sunday 3rd July. It might of been the mention about mothers, or the fact that I felt like I understood what this contributor was saying – that they loved someone, a parent, but it hurt. Maybe I am projecting? Because truth be told there is no judgment in what they’ve said, only the statement explaining it.
Sometimes I’m reminded of the reason why I call this specific branch of HOMECOMING, Homecoming; A Placeless Place. To me, it is the social experiment that just keeps on giving.
“home is where they survive.
home is not a place and I can’t call it by a border.
Home is a language I forgot and faces I haven’t heard in a long time.
Home is a child”
– anonymous / Oct 2021 / Citizens of Nowhere exhibition – NOW gallery.
I’m in Folkstone this weekend as part of New Queers On the Block and Last Friday’s Folkstone. I’m presenting an ongoing project called HOMECOMING which I started in 2019 the year before lockdown, and have been continuing throughout. The project is based on a simple question
What does home mean to you?
And anyone, from the general public, young or old, are invited to contribute using UV pens (invisible ink) in any language they want, drawing or writing straight onto the blacked out walls of buildings. This iteration see’s the work being presented at DNA in Folkstone and has in the space both this participator installation and one of my digital iterations (short film) made of the project ‘Homecoming; A Placeless Place‘ on loop. The film was made during the global lockdown and with the general public in Scarborough, UK.
Here’s a little video of the set up of the installation:
On Sunday evening we will do a ‘reveal’ event where UV torches and lights will be offered to participants for us to collectively find out what’s been offered by the public, on these walls.
Really looking forward to Sunday.
DNA space / Folkstone / 6.15pm / Chats, Chai, Film Screening and Baklawa will be shared.
The project is on going and I hope it continues to get to different parts of the UK with ambitions to take the project internationally. We all have a relationship with the idea of Home and for me, this is a conversation I find endlessly fascinating. I want to make more films around this and hopefully, in years to come, put all contributions from so many different towns, cities , countries and spaces, and publish a book about it.
Sometimes, people can be so vulnerable. If you offer them the space to be…
If I told you that my name should be spelt Istabraq but that at the borders of this country, those deciding the status of my family using a language which struggles to identify it, didn’t have patience enough to actually say.my.name…
Would you believe me?
Estabrak. It’s official. I mean, English tongues can say it.
Iss-tub-bruq is how it’s pronounced. And A rough silk only found in heaven is it’s meaning.
Because I haven’t been posting anything on my socials since late 2020, not many people know I have been exploring the medium of glass for some time now..
Pomegranates have been one of the subjects of exploration as they are a fruit which I believe deeply resonates with the politics of the region in which we (myself and the pomegranate) are both from – West Asia.
Although beautiful and with so much potential, they have also been deeply intertwined with colonial politics and their once poetically dominant meanings in herstory, value, nutrition, mythology and ancient tales of fertility have been hijacked by misplaced ideas of warfare and destruction.
“What is less apparent is the fruit’s relation to modern warfare. Stemming from the 12th century Anglo-Norman pome gernate, our English pomegranate became pume grenate in Old French. This pume grenate eventually became pomme grenade in Modern French. Pomme grenade, of course, looks exactly like grenade or hand grenade, and this is no coincidence.” -ALTA
This short post online, written some time ago now, offers a clear and straight forward definition of the complexities of this fruit.
“So why name the weapon after the fruit? If you were to crack open a hand grenade today you would see tiny balls of shrapnel inside the explosive’s casing. The shrapnel mimics the pomegranate’s seeds—each seed the potential for a new tree, each shrapnel the potential for a hit body. Shaped like a pomegranate and designed like a pomegranate, it’s certainly ironic that a weapon used to kill several people at once is named after the ancient fruit of fertility.’
It makes sense why so many Asian & African artists have used the symbol of a pomegranate to respond to white peoples wars in our homelands and countries. This language and extraction imposed upon an indigenous fruit of West Asian land is just another example of the consistent existence we must live that straddles the line of life and death, danger and beauty, the possible (fertility=future) and impossible (war=erasure).
There is so much to say about this subject.
To bring it back to the work in progress I have shared above, to me the back side of this glass pomegranate looks like the insides of a human body. Almost like lungs attached to a skeleton, I am in awe by the simplicity and clarity light can offer. Light is such a fascinating natural element.
I’m not quite sure what will come of this work I am exploring, but I know I’m working towards a language within my glass work which translates so effortlessly with my works in water and interest in the often complex and sometimes ephemeral experiences of the human condition.
Sometimes I dream of ancient worlds where fruit and bombs have never mixed. Where family, love and freedom co-exist.
Where blurred lines of nourishment and destruction do not need to exist.
Where culture no longer negates safety. Sometimes, I dream of this.
Image info:
Estabrak // Ummi (meaning My Mother in Arabic) 2021/22 // Archival print under Acrylic Glass, mounted on Aluminum Dibond // Edition of 3
ABOUT: Another offering I’d like to share is of one of my most recent underwater images. It’s a self portrait, and one which was taken in a time of deep isolation and a work which also translates into other works I am currently exploring.
I’ve so much to say about pomegranates, their heritage and the importance of them in West Asia. The significance of it’s name and the body in which it expresses. There’s so much beauty and passion in this fruit, yet so much destruction attached to it.
For years I’ve noticed it’s presence in West Asian arts, yet it’s only been in isolation with internal conversations where I’ve found my relationship to it develop from one of a human eating fruit into a life lesson in history, language, colonisation and love.
Pomegranates have origins all over West and South West Asia, although it can specifically be traced back to Iran. Iran has huge significance to me as it was the place I was born, in exile after my family were forced to flee Iraq.
I’m going to go in more detail about the significance of pomegranates in a separate post which you can find in the research section of my studio, but for now I hope this offering can plant a seed of thought for you as much as it has for me.
The photograph and text were shared earliar this year via the Emeargeast exhibition ‘Dreaming Tomorrow’. And the image Ummi belongs to a current and ongoing multidisciplinary project called Letters To Ummi (Ummi meaning My Mother in Arabic). It is the first image in this series.
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