Curated by Noel Maghathe
Mentored by Sara Raza
Presented by CUE Art Foundation
All artwork © Zeinab Saab, Kiki Salem, Nailah Taman, Zeina Zeitoun
Graphic design by Daleen Saah
Photos by Filip Wolak
CUE Art Foundation
137 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
Zeinab Saab, from Visual Decadence (2020 - 2022)
CURATED BY NOEL MAGHATHE
March 23 – May 13, 2023
CUE Art Foundation
Exhibition Mentor: Sara Raza
Catalogue Essayist: Sarah Aziza
Essay Mentor: Dina Ramadan
/ A thought is a memory is a group exhibition curated by Noel Maghathe that brings together works by four artists: Zeinab Saab, Kiki Salem, Nailah Taman, and Zeina Zeitoun. These artists, who all have lineages that trace to the so-called Arab world, draw upon their varied backgrounds in ways that both celebrate and subvert inherited identities. Through sculpture, photography, collage, animation, and painting, they embrace playful ways of making that are highly personal, often collective, and that position fluidity and rootedness as complementary rather than opposing forces in the building of selfhood, community, and culture.
Memories often serve as the source material for our personal and shared histories. The late philosopher and artist Etel Adnan, in her 2016 collection of prose and poetry, Night, wrote: “Is memory produced by us, or is it us? Our identity is very likely whatever our memory decides to retain. But let’s not presume that memory is a storage room. It’s not a tool for being able to think; it’s thinking, before thinking.”
A thought is a memory asks us to consider: what happens when memories are disrupted by displacement, migration, and political upheaval? What does it mean to be both grounded by and freed from the stories of our ancestors? Through explorations of geometry, color, light, and material, the four artists in the exhibition present works that reimagine their hybridity as Arab Americans.
Zeinab Saab’s paintings indulge in experimentations with color, opening up portals to aspects of their young self which may have been lost while navigating constructs of gender, patriarchy, and tradition. Kiki Salem’s digital animations evoke patterns from textiles designed by her/their ancestors in Palestine and motifs from the architecture they inhabited, using new technologies to reconfigure material traditions. Nailah Taman’s sculptural works visualize symbols from Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse, attempting to connect to an otherworldly “un-language” and access
its shared knowledge. Taman’s textile piece transforms an unfinished tablecloth embroidered by their taeta (grandmother) into a shelter, threading together practices of their elders with discarded materials that encapsulate a queerness they weren’t able to share. Zeina Zeitoun uses collage and film to piece together images from her visits to Lebanon, grasping for fragments of seemingly ephemeral memories and re-organizing them to construct moments she can savor beyond time.
The works presented in A thought is a memory weave together ephemeral and kaleidoscopic stories. These four artists layer experiences that are simultaneously personal, familial, communal, and political, and that are often eschewed in mainstream discourse about place—or viewed through a lens that ascribes fixed narratives to mutable notions of identity and community. Through their work, they proudly claim new spaces, rituals, and language that transcend boundaries of time and geography. “If I didn’t remember that I am, I won’t be,” wrote Etel Adnan. “Reason and memory move together.”
Resistance takes on many forms. I see this exhibition and others like it as transcending aesthetic and art historical considerations. In my curatorial practice, I consider how to create frameworks for togetherness and to serve as a catalyst for community. This exhibition provides an opportunity to connect Arab American artists in diaspora, to create physical and tangible space where such space for many of us to come together has thus far existed primarily online. Curating is an act that can create moments in time and provide avenues for hope to flourish.
In / A thought is a memory, four artists, Zeinab Saab, Kiki Salem, Nailah Taman, and Zeina Zeitoun, address memory as part of their personal and community experiences, delving into past selves, memories, and ancestral ideologies. Though their work is not singularly focused on identity in a traditional and stereotypical sense, each artist navigates aspects of their identity through their practice, interweaving themes of duality, lineage, recollection, and fluidity as they draw upon individual and collective memory and their cultural hybridity as Arab Americans.
Memory is a fragile and subjective experience. What and how we remember is shaped by our varying perspectives, and our memories in turn shape and reshape our individual and collective identities. For diasporic communities, particularly those who identify as “Arab American,” the dynamics that contribute to the formation of identity are even more complicated, as our memories traverse multiple geographies, generations, homelands, languages, and traumas. How do we express this complexity with each other and to those around us? How can we resist narratives and constructs that tell monolithic stories, and who
Through works that are diverse in medium, form, color, pattern, and symbolism, each artist in the exhibition navigates displacement as it relates to their unique experiences as Americans and as Arabs, with cultural “homelands” ranging from the Levant (Lebanon and Palestine) to North Africa (Egypt). They create new visual languages that revisit tradition and ritual, and sometimes seek to subvert it altogether. From Zeinab Saab’s brightly
BY NOEL MAGHATHEcolored dimensional works on paper to Kiki Salem’s animations of tile-inspired designs; from Nailah Taman’s sculptural use of ancestral and future-oriented unlanguages to Zeina Zeitoun’s nostalgic act of embedding collages with familial photos and keepsakes, the artists keep memory at the forefront of their creative practices, emphasizing the complex formulation of identity through the layering of experiences and forms of expression.
To me, A thought is a memory is more than an exhibition. It is an act of resistance against the marginalization of SWANA voices and cultures in mainstream art institutions, a celebration of Arab creatives, and an opportunity to connect over shared and disparate cultural experiences. Through the works of these four women and non-binary Arab American artists, we are reminded of the importance of discursive spaces and practices that address our heritages from nuanced, non-reductive, and often celebratory perspectives. This, in turn, allows artists in diaspora to come together, collaborate, and share their stories in ways that feel authentic for us. This exhibition represents a crucial step toward a diverse and proliferative Arab American futurity.
Noel Maghathe is a queer, mixed Palestinian-American performance artist and curator. They create and perform with queer functional tools to navigate the world, and their practice centers their Palestinian heritage. Through their work, they seek to educate audiences about the pain of occupation and their yearning for their country while also delving into deeper dimensions of personal identity beyond surface-level labels. Maghathe values connecting with other Palestinian and Arab artists in our homelands and in the diaspora. They hold a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where they were awarded the Stephen H. Wilder Traveling Scholarship in 2017. In 2022, they exhibited their work at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Pancake House Gallery, Maelstrom Collaborative Arts, and more. Maghathe was also selected as Curatorin-Residence at Wave Pool, where they curated Amid, an international Palestinian art exhibition. Currently based in Cincinnati, Ohio, Maghathe continues to create work in their studio.
“The End of the World was a nightclub.” Saeed Jones, “Alive at the End of the World”
a red sun a reddened sun a red beginning an ending sun a red reddening into a sun a red beyond the red americans call sun a pink sun a Dearborn midnight sun unreflecting a pink sun a sun washed pink a sun bleached of its flesh a disco sun a glaring shatter beneath every pink is a red craving its own flesh a pink fleshy sun a red bleached sun a black hole craving a fleshless sun a quivering sun a spaghettified sun the mornings fragile tubed glory a sun refusing to pair with itself a rancid sun an intifada of homosexuals a bleach guzzling sun a crowd of holes guzzling bleach an Arab dawn a holy aubade an Arab dawn chanting STOP a book with a hole in it STOP a book with a sun at its STOP a crowd with a hole in its heart a crowd chanting the sun holy an Arab mass a s h a t t e r (i) n g collective a queer queer night a sun craving the night's hole the sun's mirror saying I'M JUST A HOLE
DADDY sun a sun craving its own fall its own red a sun sub
-optimal red a red redder than the red of STOP a daddy sun a murder of fathers a bleaching of crows a turtle LOVE IS LOVE a laughing sun a guffawed hole a nostril sun JESUS with a hole in his handhearthole JESUS snorted sun son who bears a cross of coke STOP salvation of sub
-missive sun a crest whitening sun STRIP a teeth-lined hole rimming STOP a crestfallen sun a disco sadness
I held the sun in my hands like a flagpole DADDY
I wash my hands of the sun DADDY and all the water runs pink every wingspan is an elsewhere resisting form
-lessness sanity in the rubble sanity a cleft treble sanity infrequency sanity in sanityinsanityinsanity into perfect holes such suns are STOP a european extraction of sun a solar rorschach paint me like one of your french
STOP the lyric I is a flagpole at the center of my
STOP the lyric I is an abusive father reaching up from beneath the
STOP the lyric I on the front cover of the new yorker saying KILL ME
DADDY a sun who wants to die by
STOP a sun who just wants to be a (w)hole
STOP a sun who dies to become a hole of himself sub
-TERFuge I ref use I ex cess I like sun carved into s kin of batata pan oramic sun in fidel sun of g(r)azing STOP
I looked the sun in the eye like a whisper DO NOT
RETURN TO ME DO NOT RETURN DO NOT PASS GO DO NOT COLLECT TWO HUNDRED DOLL
hairy I lyric every sun is a mis translation of STOP
sun looking unto the K in KELLOGG the illiteracy of business STOP
union-busting sun corpse trampling sun fork lift fork LIFTA
RESORTS COME SEE JERUSALEM FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF A sun spot a sun freckled in the face like almonds STOP de hydra tion thirsty I thirsting sun I quake in an excess of HALF
AN ALMOND of LIGHT in the LIGHT in that LIGHT there where I can almost miss you
you who taught me to paint in Arabic to witness in English to taint the English with spectral witnessing the catastrophe of LOVE
LESSNESS is it catastrophe I lack CAN’T A GIRL JUST SPIRAL IN PIECES the lyric I who wants to summon its ancestors can only summon americans chanting BAN THEM amidst Arabs chanting BAN THEM amidst the BANNED Arabs joining the crowd amidst americans pissing themselves into solar un-context the Arab who wants to be poet qasida the epic ghazal me lovelust sonnet me into trans
laureate saying PAINT ME LIKE ONE OF YOUR SAND -national hole the i and dot the (teehee!) the catastrophe of LOVE was a catastrophe of LAND
LESSNESS was a catastrophe
LESSNESS was a catastrophe of LOVE of LAND a catastrophe of LOVE a catastrophe of
This poem takes formal inspiration from both Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse and Tarik Dobbs’s Dragphrasis poem and installation work. Some lines reference works by Kamelya Omayma Youssef and Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and the final page includes screenshots from Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie-Rose. The piece is a response to contemporary interfaces of Arab-ness, American-ness, and homophobia, recalling recent events such as protests of LGBTQ books in Dearborn, an Arab American Today article with a headline about a “homosexual intifada,” and more broadly, the rise of homophobic hate crimes in the US settler state, including the Club Q mass shooting in Colorado Springs.
I was moved by the challenges posed by Rebecca Johnson and Hannah Feldman, at the end of a seminar on Modernism and Decoloniality, to think critically about what forms of discourse are deemed “acceptable” by institutions, and how artistic and poetic form can intervene in failures of language (from inter-communal contexts to broader institutional and state apparatuses).
وه
George Abraham (they/ ) is a Palestinian American poet. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers, and a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, The Arab American National Museum, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, National Performance Network, and more. They are currently co-editing a Palestinian global anglophone poetry anthology with Noor Hindi (Haymarket Books, 2024) and are a Litowitz MFA+MA student at Northwestern University.
What inspired you to make this body of work?
There wasn’t really anything that inspired this body of work other than having free time on my hands during the pandemic and being forced to sit with myself. I think it came organically with all of the transitions that were taking place in my life, and quite frankly, I got bored with the work I was making prior to this current body of work. I needed something different. I think that the notion of the grid has always been present in my work, and this current work is just a transformation of that.
How did your childhood experiences shape the nostalgia present in your work?
I find that this work is a longing for what I wanted as a child but never got. I am not talking about material things, but rather the ways in which I’ve wanted to express myself but couldn’t. In many ways, I find that this work represents a playful and joyful component that wasn’t really present in my life as a kid.
How do you see the language of the grid evolving in your future work?
I am not sure how this work will evolve, and I am glad that is the case. This body of work feels like it came out of nowhere, and it was refreshing because it was unplanned from the start. I am hoping that the way it evolves continues to be birthed out of the unknown. Planning for future work can kill so much of the joy of making. Putting pressure on myself to think ahead of a body of work will only make me dread it. I am trying to enjoy the work and not let the anxiety of the future taint the joy that is present before me.
The process of naming the works comes after the piece is made. The titles are inspired heavily by popular culture references—anxiety and sadness wrapped in humor. I have always been one to deflect feelings with humor. For a while, I felt that this was something to work on or to be shameful of, but now I am finding humor to be a sigh of relief in the heavier moments in
life. The titles play a role in characterizing what I am feeling in the moment of making. I do not think too much about them shaping viewers’ interpretation of the work. I label them for me, and I have no particular idea in mind about how the viewer should look at the work, nor would I ever want that.
Does your work address identity and representation as an Arab American artist? If so, how?
I honestly don’t think about my identity in my work. I made my peace with that in previous work, and I am glad I did because it was necessary at the time to explore and release those stories. But in doing that, I felt like I lost myself. I got so caught up in identity that I neglected the other complex components of my existence. This body of work made me realize that.
I have a lot of processing to do and memories to unravel. For me, having an explicit focus on either embracing or challenging notions of what it means to be an Arab American artist doesn’t allow me space for exploration of deeper emotions caused from being Arab American. And by that, I mean that in my past work, the pressure to represent my culture didn’t allow me to address the messy realities I’ve faced at the expense of this identity. Arab American culture was not kind to me. I felt conflicted growing up here and there, and there is a lot of pain that I experienced due to how Arab culture absorbed Western patriarchy. Gender and class dynamics within Arab American culture made me question my “Arabness,” regardless of my family background or even my name. I had to let go of the desire to “break stereotypes” because I have a lot of hurt to process based on what I was told defines my identity as an Arab. I say this because we don’t acknowledge enough the complexity of our relationships with our cultural identity, and I am tired of attempting to romanticize something that at many times doesn’t make me feel like I belong. To anyone who grew up as first generation in an immigrant family, this is not new. We have pushed those raw feelings to the side, and it ends up hurting us in the long run.
Zeinab Saab (b. Dearborn, Michigan) is based in Portland, Oregon. Their current work focuses on exploration of the inner child through color theory and the grid. They received their BFA in Printmaking from Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, OH in 2015, and completed their MFA in Printmaking at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL in 2019. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in San Francisco, St. Louis, Detroit, New York, California, Dubai, New Mexico, and Hawaii among other places, and is held in several permanent collections, including Emory University, The Bainbridge Museum of Art, Zayed University in Dubai, UAE, the Arab American National Museum, and the University of Iowa’s Special Collections Library.
How do you utilize animation to explore the memories of ancestors in your work?
I use the medium of animation to honor the work developed by women and craftspeople who came before me. I study their designs, learn the meanings represented in each motif, and seek to become fluent in their visual languages. After I learn and record these designs digitally, I reimagine them, tweak their colors, and make them move. The final work becomes a conversation between history and the present, and this can only happen through the process I’ve chosen.
Can you share one specific memory attached to one of the three patterns?
As far as patterns represented in the show, they are based on field research between Palestine and southern Spain, during trips I’ve gone on over the past few years. One of the works in particular, Wudu, has a nude color scheme that came from a bathroom tile design present in a family member’s home in Palestine. I remember really hating the brown to tan ombré tiles every time I visited. After making the design for the animation, I decided to revisit this color scheme and truly fell in love with the gradient. I visited that same relative’s home last year and showed them the animation that was inspired by their bathroom. It was a funny little full-circle moment.
What role does color play in the memories you depict in your animations?
Color is really important to the work I do. I feel as though all my life, I’ve been surrounded by vibrant colors. The majority of the gifts I received from my grandmother growing up were beautifully curated colorful crochet blankets, scarves, and hats—extensions of her warmth that still keep us covered even after she has passed on. In many ways, my use of colors is inspired by my ancestors’ mastery of color theory.
Can you describe your process of recreating the patterns and visual language of tiles in your work?
I’m constantly doing field research and remote research. I take photos of tiles in places I visit: mosques, homes, tile factories, shops, offices, etc. I have an archive of reference images from various places and sources. There is a tracing process that happens very early on when I begin to create an animation, mural, or digital design. Sometimes, I copy the design exactly from the reference image, and other times, I add or remove elements. I add color after the pattern of the animation is complete. Most of the time, I digitize the original color scheme, and then duplicate it in a new color scheme that matches my palette or what I’m feeling for the design. It ends up becoming a collaborative process with artists from a different time.
How does your work challenge traditional notions of representation in Arab American art?
I feel like my existence is a challenge to traditional notions of Arab American representation. I was raised very differently from a lot of Arabs in America, especially compared to people who hail from my village in Palestine. That being said, my hybridized upbringing is well reflected in my work. I feel as though this deviation from stark tradition has translated well in my art practice.
Kiki Salem (b. 1995, Al-Bireh, Palestine) is a St. Louis-based multidisciplinary Artist, Designer, Writer, Educator, Lover, Learner, and overall bad bitch. Through various mediums, with textiles at the focus, her practice covers topics of escapism, occidental assimilation, orientalism, experimental visual pattern development, linguistic hybridization, and the Palestinian question. Kiki is a member of the Screwed Arts Collective in St. Louis. Her wearable collection, Punk Ass Arab (@punk_ass_arab) can be found on Instagram.
What are your various processes of collecting material?
I collect material on a routine basis, walking through the streets of Minneapolis or on trips out of town. Often, my found materials are discarded plastic bits and other throwaways, which I like to juxtapose with natural materials in my collection, such as rocks gathered near the Mississippi or shells collected from the Red Sea. Those in my life know that I find great beauty and value in found objects and their disparate energetic pulls, and I am lucky that I am often gifted such materials by loved ones who see an object and think it belongs with me. In this moment of ecological destruction, it is important to me to utilize things that would end up in a landfill and showcase their beauty. I often recontextualize objects as subjects, tipping the emphasis from utilitarian purpose (destruction) to that of imagined worlds (building).
Could you share how the work Plushieglyphs informed the creation of Etel’s Sigils?
The symbolic stories told through hieroglyphs and petroglyphs in the Egyptian Book of the Dead inspired me to create Plushieglyphs 1-5. I was interpreting them through the lens of comfort and softness, and I intentionally hand-sewed the perimeters to mimic the act of carving. These works were presented at a show with my studiomates that opened on November 6, 2021. Less than a week later, Etel Adnan passed away. While processing the grief of losing one of the most formative influences on my work, I came to the realization that although the Plushieglyphs may be the inception of my own language, her influence is majorly present. I knew my next iteration of symbolism needed to be more explicitly for her—or from her—which is why I consider Etel's Sigils to be sculptural excerpts from the text.
What is the significance of incorporating different languages and un-languages into your work?
The study of archetypal images, symbols, and sigils untethers us from contemporary forms of identity representation. These un-languages return us to the ancestral influences and tools we need to rebuild a
New Unsettled World. Traditional language—especially English—can only say so much, and I believe shapes can say more than words sometimes.
How did you choose which objects to include in Taeta’s Tabletent, and what was your process for preserving and displaying them within the resin windows?
The objects within the windows of Taeta's Tabletent were mainly collected during early-stage pandemic life. As I found myself isolated and without my normal routine, I became pretty sick mentally. I started to pick up things around me that grabbed my attention, an act of grounding myself in the moment and preserving bits of time when I felt there was a lack of distinctiveness around me. There are also other objects — a stone from the Farafra Oasis in the western Sahara, a bottle of my fiancé’s testosterone, a broken hair clip I wore for years, an old doll rattle, and a shell my cousin gave me from Mexico. I keep my collected bits together in containers, and I like to play with the arrangement a number of times, laying out various pieces in different patterns and snapping pictures until I stumble upon the combination that feels intuitively best. By patching in my cherished blanket and the resin windows, I add my own memories and energies to the textile. I preserve bits of myself in resin, and these pieces become windows to look through with a natural distortion and perspective.
Do you seek to resist traditional notions of representation in Arab American art? If so, how?
I am always trying to make space for queer and trans representation within SWANA contexts, as queer people are everywhere. We always have been and always will be. This show centers around the exploration of memory, and that in and of itself resists traditional notions of representation. Memory is not set in stone. Memory is influenced by generations of storytelling, lived and inherited traumas, and joy. Memory is queer in the sense that it is abundantly fluid and rooted in collectivity, but there is also a great need to prioritize self-embodiment of these values as time rolls forwards.
Nailah Taman (b. 1993, Minnesota) is a nonbinary Egyptian American multidisciplinary artist and abolitionist organizer based in Minneapolis, MN. They graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2015 with a BA in Visual Arts, and are a member of PF Community Studios in Minneapolis. Their work explores energetic accumulation, tactility and texture, and mental illness and language, often emerging in sculptural forms. They are an avid collector of objects deemed precious by their own criteria. Find them on Instagram at @everything_coming_up_roses.
Can you discuss the role of language in your work?
The element of language plays a huge role in my collages and video pieces. From words that aren’t reciprocated to lyrics that were sung to me as a child, language brings forth a sense of history that’s hidden beneath the visual and tangible evidence of family. In my collages, excerpts from Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse and intentional repetition of the phrase “THANK YOU FOR FLYING” signal how I was feeling while making them, and also give the viewer an idea of what it’s like to live in the middle of memory and reality. In the video piece Happiness is the Sea and my Baba Smiling, a lot of the language comes from home videos and a comforting yet haunting song from my childhood. There is an element of language that feels lost. I try to ask my father questions about the past in broken Arabic, but these questions never have an answer.
How has your personal experience of migration influenced your artistic practice?
My personal experience of migration is heavily influenced by my parents and their journey to the so-called land of North America, but it didn’t stop there. Ever since I was born, my parents would take us to visit Lebanon every year. Something truly happens in your brain and heart when you’re forced to leave your loved ones every year. When you’re forced to sit on a plane you don’t want to be in and go back to a place you don’t feel genuine in, you find yourself in the middle of a messed-up game of tug of war. When you become old enough to make your own decisions, life has moved on. Cousins have moved on. Work life and personal life have moved on, but your heart never really does. Everything I’ve been doing thus far in my artistic practice hails from that.
How does water or the sea play a role in your collage work, and what significance does it hold for you?
You know the running joke that an Arab dad teaches their kids how to swim in the sea by literally flinging their tiny bodies into the water and hoping for the best? Yup, that was my sisters and me. The significance of the sea comes from my dad, Samer Wajih Zeitoun. With family, many of the negative stories about living in Beirut get swept
under the rug, but the positive ones don’t. I remember waking up before sunrise to fish at Raoushe rock, my father teaching us how to fish like a boss, and hearing the words mitlel fishy (“like the fish”) while swimming underwater until we couldn’t hold our breath anymore. These were integral parts of my childhood that I see in my artistic practice and in my everyday life.
Can you talk more about your process of collecting and deconstructing family videos, photos, and other items for use in your collages?
It’s borderline hoarding at this point. With all the uncertainty in the region, maybe it comes from the fear of things being forgotten and wanting something to hold onto. Maybe it’s just to have the feeling of reliving a memory in the tiniest way. I keep my boarding passes and passport photos, VHS tapes that eventually must be converted into digital copies, photos with writing on the back, and even cool wrapping paper from Beirut as souvenirs. With some collages, I like to use different mediums from the same moment, and in others, I tend to grab moments from each medium to create a whole new moment. These moments usually have people in them, faceless or not. I also collected a lot of personal items that belonged to my jido (grandfather) after he passed. Naturally, it took a little more time for me to truly look through these and utilize them, but I hope they did my jido the justice he deserves.
As an Arab American artist, are there ways in which you try to challenge stereotypical or traditional forms of representation?
My work comes from a loving and authentic place. So much of Arab American art does the same, and we’re all trying to challenge forms of representation that feel stereotypical while making an impact in the art world more generally. Our stories, histories, and memories are important, and lately, I’ve seen more artists work toward demanding space for a type of representation that centers these varied and nuanced stories. Every Arab American has a distinct, yet somehow familiar experience navigating this world and this country. The notion of these distinctions and connections themselves is a challenge to what we consume about Arab American identity in mainstream spaces everyday.
Zeina Zeitoun (b. Arlington, Virginia) is a New York City based artist, photographer, and photo editor born in America and raised in between the US and Lebanon. She was born to two Lebanese immigrants, and is the youngest of three strong and courageous daughters. During her formative years, Zeina realized that her passion for visual arts could be combined with her natural need for activism and education. She now creates personal bodies of work across multiple mediums that document familial and self discovery. These bodies of work hail from the many complicated corners of being a Lebanese-American woman living in the US. Her creative storytelling has recently morphed itself into collaging, using an ever-growing archive of home photos, videos, songs, poems, collected artifacts, objects hoarded throughout the years, and more.
To serve as a mentor to emerging young curator Noel Maghathe on their journey to ideate the curation of A thought is a memory at CUE in New York has been an enriching and highly rewarding experience. As a practicing artist, Noel’s purview is akin to mine as an art historian and curator. We both follow the lead of the artists as part of a reciprocal, ideas-driven curatorial narrative. As Noel’s mentor, I have had the opportunity to share my own knowledge, expertise, and experience, and to together rethink—or, in some cases, “unthink”—what it means to curate “Arab” art that sits at the intersection of “otherness.”
I am deeply proud of the curatorial thesis that Noel has developed around memory as a singular subjective idea, as well as their intentional focus on making space for the more plural and expanded concept of shared cultural memory. We discussed what it means to be a multifaceted practicing Arab artist living and working in America today, to grapple with multi-hyphenated identities—such as ArabAmerican—that occupy spaces of duality, and to carefully balance the predicament of being overly seen and heard versus not being seen at all.
Traversing these central questions and seeing how they transcended sensitively into CUE’s gallery space, it is apparent that Noel’s curation is generationally privy to a young and bold set of non-conformist artist peers. This group of artists, collaboratively guided by Noel, represent a set of new wave voices who are not afraid of subverting tradition and culture and asking questions that are embedded with a sense of poetic code. Their ideas create a nuanced visual tapestry through pattern languages; they stitch, weave, and juxtapose visual cultural fragments that mirror the exhibition’s thematics. Collectively, the exhibition creates a visual repository to store the myriad ways in which memories created in the past are shaped, made, remade, and repurposed through the non-didactic art of our time.
SARA RAZASara Raza is an award-winning curator and writer specializing in global art and visual cultures from a postcolonial, post-Soviet perspective. She is the author of Punk Orientalism: The Art of Rebellion (Black Dog Press, London 2022). Raza has curated for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Mathaf: Modern Arab Art Museum (Doha, Qatar), and the 55th Venice Biennale, among others. Formerly, she was the Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator for the Middle East and North Africa at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Curator of Public Programs at Tate Modern, London. Sara holds a BA and an MA, both from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and pursued studies towards her PhD at the Royal College of Art, London. She lives and works in New York City, where she teaches MA courses at New York University and the School of Visual Arts.
The first time I remember hearing the word “Palestine,” I was about six years old. The moment is captured on a family video that shows my father seated in the corner of our playroom, leaning a globe on his knee. “Daddy is from a place called Palestine,” he says, holding up the round replica of the world. In my mind’s eye, I recall vividly the thin lines of the painted topography, my father’s fingertip abutting the words ISRAEL/ PALESTINE1. Still only barely able to read, I stared at the ink, willing it to enter me, to reveal its mystery.
Most second- and third-generation immigrants retain a version of this threshold in their childhood memories. The idea of homeland arrives, haloing all things with elsewhere and before. The self-evident, singular present gives way to a messy enmeshment with history. The child discovers that she is part of a multitude she has not seen, her body a nexus of others’ memories. Whether her family’s immigration was due to force or choice, her life becomes a counterpoint, cast in relief against what might have been
Soon, she will also have to contend with the imagination of those outside her ethnicized group. / A thought is a memory, a group exhibition at CUE Art Foundation curated by Noel Maghathe, presents work by four artists—Zeinab Saab, Kiki Salem, Nailah Taman, Zeina Zeitoun—who all identify as Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA).2 Each has confronted the limited, neo-Orientalist expectations which too often frame the work of SWANA artists through the pseudo-curiosity of an audience that seeks not to learn, but to reaffirm the limited and familiar. For such consumers, desirable cultural production satisfies a lurid, post-9/11 tendency to both otherize and “humanize” the (particularly Muslim) “Middle Eastern” subject. Among the most celebrated works are those presenting spectacles of suffering, glossed folklore, or flamboyant rejections of supposedly-traditional barbarity.
These stifling expectations from non-SWANA audiences are often compounded by an internal pressure to create art that conveys unadulterated affection and nostalgia
for specific versions of a supposedly-collective past. We are expected to account for, and in fact constitute, notions of self and nation based not in personal experience but in contrived vocabularies—based either on the presumptions of outsiders or a duty to our elders’ (often sentimental) memories. In each, complexity is elided, as we are called upon to represent communities that may be much more expansive or diverse than what we know. A thought is memory contemplates these gaps through imaginative gestures that create a space beyond overdetermined terrains. The show presents works that are diverse in medium and material, from painting to digital animation, film, photo collage, installation, and soft sculpture. The result is a chorus of new languages, one that revels in declarations of futurity springing from living, multi-varied histories.
Many of the works in the show are exercises in triangulation, as the artists move imaginatively around —and through— collective silences. Zeina Zeitoun contemplates the ways in which absence and loss haunt her relationship with both her father and the Lebanon he left behind. In the film work Happiness is the Sea and my Baba Smiling, Zeitoun splices together fragments of a family video that depict the artist as a little girl splashing and clinging to her father’s neck as they swim in the Mediterranean. The footage is cut with a black screen and white text subtitling the artist’s one-sided conversation with her father. “There is a scar on the back of your leg… I asked you where you got it from…” The closing segment, which shows Zeitoun and her father in split-screen facing away from one another, confirms the film’s ultimate experience of a love defined by innumerable unknowns, omissions both chosen and inevitable.
In Zeitoun’s collages, composed of photographs and film stills, old flight tickets, and snippets of text, the artist’s family archival material provide means to contemplate ancestral mystery. In one work, bright depictions of waves and hills are disrupted by human figures that are mostly truncated and obscured. In another, the figure of Zeitoun’s grandfather appears dislodged, sliding out
of frame against what looks like scraps from a diary. Paper-thin, these layers evoke dimensions that are not there, objects beyond grasp. A particular kind of memory: a grief for that which might have been.
Nailah Taman also embeds familial artifacts in their work, creating makeshift meeting spaces between the past and the artist’s imagination. These spaces flicker with the light of alternate lives and intimacies, forming original collaborations with the past. In this experimentation, Taman joins Zeitoun in a practice I term speculative memory. While Zeitoun’s speculation slants toward mourning, Taman is eager to reach for that which is only made possible with distance and time.
In Taeta’s Tabletent, Taman creates a portal-shelter where then, now, and future meet. They began with a partially-embroidered tablecloth left incomplete by their Egyptian grandmother (taeta). After stumbling across the discarded item, they partnered with their taeta’s living spirit, constructing a moveable dwelling place embellished with objects from their personal and familial past—seashells, an inhaler, their fiance’s empty bottle of testosterone.
Through this work, Taman collapses barriers of time and space, creating juxtapositions that were once impossible. Bonds of birth and blood are made contemporaneous with Taman’s adulthood, their chosen loves. Their queerness is placed into proximity with their grandmother’s lips. Threads stitched in the 1980s of the AIDS crisis live alongside objects that Taman rescued from COVID-era trash piles on the street. Hoisted as a shelter that evokes either childhood games or iconic Bedouin camps, it has the effect of welcome, wonder, even nurturing. Perhaps the present has something to offer the past, and not only the other way around.
Zainab Saab’s work, which includes a series of experimental paintings on paper, emerges from their own path toward self-determination and futurity. The gestures are hard won—growing up in the uniquelylarge Arab American community in Dearborn, Saab faced intra-community pressure to conform to a particular form of Lebanese femininity. As such, familial and communal interpretations of Arabness—as well as gender and religion—felt overdetermined, and like something to escape.
Saab’s paintings signal a successful jailbreak. In contrast to the classic diasporic project of capturing an evanescent, collective past, Saab seeks to recover their inner child. The series Visual Decadence, for example, emerged from pandemic experimentations, when Saab bought themself the colorful gel pens they once yearned for as a child. The works are boisterous, ringing with vivid colors that vibrate and shimmer in abstraction. Both geometric and fluid, and accompanied in the show by similar large-scale works with titles such as You Wanted Femininity, But All I Have is Fire and Can’t A Girl Just Spiral In Peace?, Saab’s paintings are windows into youthful mischief, flamboyance, and joy. Together, they are an exuberant declaration of presence, a claiming of space in the here and now.
Kiki Salem also conceives of a vividly-imagined future, incorporating materials both inherited and bespoke. Salem’s works call back to their Palestinian heritage through Islamic architecture as well as traditional embroidery. Drawing upon the shapes and patterns of each, the artist brings these historically-rich legacies into endless, digital life. In A thought is memory, Salem
presents projections and paintings that occupy both sides of large, handmade screens hung from the gallery ceiling. FOLLOW THE LEAD(ER) riffs on a diamondand-spade pattern from Islamic tiling, the animation alternating between oranges, greens, purples, and golds. In What is Destined For You Will Come to You Even if it is Between Two Mountains, Salem draws on the eightpointed star of Jerusalem, creating an interlocking spread of shapes in which color pulses outward from a red center, evoking a throbbing heart. Salem invites these would-be static symbols to breathe—and to dance.
This hypnotic effect splices together the ancient and modern in a way that speaks to the relentless march of time. It also gestures to the particularly Palestinian search for ever new and ingenious ways to transcend the obstacles placed between us and our homeland. Bursting with unapologetic color, Salem’s animations move ceaselessly, telling us that Palestine will exist in the future. There are new memories to come.
For all four artists, that which is culturally “Arab” is imbued into their work with a subversive subtlety, present in accents and glimpses such as embroidery, geometry, mosaic, and text. When these visual aspects appear, they do so on their own terms, original and un-beholden to precedent or cliché. The effect is thrilling; one cannot help but feel a sense of the future, an assurance that there is more—at last and as there has always been—to being SWANA than forever-longing for the past.
These nuanced, imaginative forays are more than pleasurable—they are necessary. For all the external demands placed on idealized narratives of Arab American experience, much of our diasporic memory is shrouded in personal pain. Like so many Arab American families living on the far side of two centuries of Western colonization3, war, and upheaval, my relatives were selective in their retelling of the past. As a child, I often sat and stared at photos of my father and grandmother. Grainy and grayscale, in a mid-1960s Gazan refugee camp, their faces were grave and beautiful. Around them lay evidence of chaos: the glare of sunlight hitting debris, stones strewn around my father’s bare feet.
Looking at these photos filled me with a mixture of longing and alarm. I could not comprehend the young boy as my father, the somber young mother as the same woman who now filled our kitchen with the fragrance
of frying onions, maramiya, and sumac. There was an infinity between ISRAEL/PALESTINE and our home in northern Illinois, which my father’s brief geography lesson did little to fill. The first word in that backslashed name—Israel—was a topic too painful to broach, as was Nakba, its synonym. Aside from a few token stories, my parents leaned on the American “melting pot” mythos, choosing to believe its promise to obliterate the unique textures of our pain. And so, I joined many others who inherited a form of double-erasure. Together, we are left trailing in the wake of opaque histories, pondering scraps in the periphery of photographs, secrets tucked in silences.
A thought is a memory wades through these fragments, arching between the past and a diasporic story of the future. It converges times and places—the gone, the current, the never-were, the yet-might-be. The works brought together by Noel Maghathe—whose curatorial practice centers the hybridity, diversity, and community of artists of the Arab American diaspora—create something beyond their sum: a sense of multiplicity, of mystery that feels exciting rather than terminal. A viewer may feel something akin to what I feel staring at photos of two strangers who are also family, who are also me. A sense of yearning and bewilderment. Of utter knowledge that is only waiting for the right language. Perhaps, in the kaleidoscope of ephemeral movement, hypnotizing color, otherworldly glyphs, and muted ink, the viewer finds forms that resonate. Much like Etel Adnan’s symbolic language, these expressions could be ancient, extra-terrestrial, or both. Just like us.
Endnotes:
1. When searching for "Palestine" on Google Maps, the map zooms in on the Israel-Palestine region, and both the Gaza Strip and West Bank territories are labeled and separated by dotted lines. But there is no label for Palestine. Apple Maps, similar to Google, zooms in on the region but doesn't label anything as Palestine. [Fact check: Google does not have a Palestine label on its maps, USA Today, May 22, 2022].
In moments of despondency – or, for others no doubt, mere realism – it can be tempting to answer the question “Where is Palestine?” with “Nowhere”: nowhere geographically, nowhere politically, nowhere theoretically, nowhere postcolonially. [Where is Palestine?, Patrick Williams & Anna Ball (2014), Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50:2, 127-133].
2. SWANA is a term increasingly used to situate the region and its peoples in geographically neutral terms, as opposed to the Euro-centric political orientation embedded in “Middle East.”
3. Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798; France’s colonization of Algeria began in 1830, of Tunisia in 1881, and of Morocco in 1912. Meanwhile, Britain colonized Egypt in 1882, and also took control of Sudan in 1899. Further colonial incursions followed.
Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer and translator who splits her time between New York City and the Middle East. Her journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Lux Magazine, The Rumpus, NPR, The New York Times, the Asian American Writers Workshop, and The Nation among others. She is currently working on her first book, a hybrid work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream.
Dina A Ramadan served as a mentor for this essay. Ramadan is Continuing Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College and Faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, where she teaches on modern and contemporary cultural production from the Middle East, decolonial movements, and migration. She has contributed to Art Journal, Journal of Visual Culture, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and is currently completing a book on Egyptian art criticism titled The Education of Taste: Art, Aesthetics, and Subject Formation in Colonial Egypt (Edinburgh University Press). Her writing on contemporary art has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, e-flux Criticism, ArtReview, and Art Papers.
This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICAUSA (US section of the International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays about the work of artists exhibiting at CUE's gallery space. For more information about the program, visit the ACMP page on CUE's website at www.cueartfoundation.org. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior written consent from the author.
CUE Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization that works with and for emerging and underrecognized artists and art workers to create new opportunities and present varied perspectives in the arts. Through our gallery space and public programs, we foster the development of thought-provoking exhibitions and events, create avenues for mentorship, cultivate relationships amongst peers and the public, and facilitate the exchange of ideas.
Founded in 2003, CUE was established with the purpose of presenting a wide range of artist work from many different contexts. Since its inception, the organization has supported artists who experiment and take risks that challenge public perceptions, as well as those whose work has been less visible in commercial and institutional venues.
Exhibiting artists are selected through two methods: nomination by an established artist or selection via our annual open call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, each artist is paired with a mentor, an established curator or artist who provides support throughout the process of developing each exhibition.
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Programmatic support for CUE Art Foundation is provided by Evercore, Inc; ING Group; The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; The William Talbott Hillman Foundation; and Corina Larkin & Nigel Dawn. Programs are also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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