Aliya Al-Adwani

My project is an installation consisting of two large-scale works: a drawing on paper and a textile work. 1. Intexo, Obtexo, Detexo, 2023, charcoal and pastel on vellum, 4 x 8 ft I used pastel on the back side of a rubbing to create patterns like those of a Sadu rug and added traditional pictographic symbols of a kind that I recalled from my childhood. I also used graffiti- and latrinalia-inspired words and phrases to break up the geometric symmetry and create a hybrid artwork. 2. Intexo, Obtexo, Subtexo, 2023, yarn and wood, 3 x 7.5 ft Across from the drawing hangs a patchwork fabric embroidered with hybrid pictographs and words. The fabric presents the same words as the drawing, in English on one side and in Arabic on the other. On each side, the threads that have passed through from the other side obscure the forms of the words and make them illegible. My work exists in the spaces between legibility and illegibility, between what can be seen or recognized and what can’t, in a way that suggests my own position between borders, languages, and cultures. I consider what gets lost in translation in the movement from one thing to another and reflect on the coexistence of multiple versions of a single image or object. Referencing traditions of material culture as symbols of a broader social structure, I work through a process of hybridization. I use this methodology to disrupt the order and clarity of systems—traditional patterns on textiles, alphabetical systems, the structures of space itself. In this way I generate new systems, complex and often indecipherable, made up of multiple parts and layers that fluctuate in relation to one another, across time and space.