Lebanese artist Aya Haidar works across a variety of media, and is particularly well known for her use of textiles and embroidery. Yet while her approach to, and use of, different media has profound conceptual depth, her main medium – if one can call it that – is storytelling.
With a keen sense of social justice and a deep engagement with topics of war, trauma, violence, and loss, Haidar’s work directly addresses our sense of humanity rather than conveying specific political or ideological points of view. Her pieces are not morally authoritative, but rather invite contemplation and dialogue with her subjects (often women) and their lived experiences.
Born in the United States to Lebanese parents, Haidar lived in Saudi Arabia until the age of six, before settling in the United Kingdom with her family. Despite her multicultural trajectory, Haidar remembers her upbringing as distinctly Lebanese, “I grew up in the consistency of a Lebanese home [...] speaking Arabic – Lebanese Arabic – and eating Lebanese food, listening to Lebanese music, all that was so important that I just never really thought of the outside.”
She recalls spending most of her childhood afternoons with her grandmother, who lived just down the road. “She would be stitching and mending and fixing her clothes and doing the cooking and cleaning and pottering about the house. And I’d be following her and we’d be having these conversations while I helped her and while I did the same things as her [...] so from a young age, attributing the making, literally the busying of hands, whether it’s cooking or sewing, to conversation, was such a natural path,” she adds.
Following school, Haidar embarked on a degree in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, which included a stint at the Fibre and Materials Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She describes this exchange as a pivotal moment in her career, leading to a more serious engagement with textiles, “[My exchange in Chicago] changed my whole practice, because it introduced me to textiles within an artistic realm. Historically, when I thought of textiles, it was really just practical, it was mending, repairing, it was darning, it wasn’t any way of thinking about making political work, but [the exchange] opened my eyes to that.”
Today, Haidar sees her use of textiles as a decidedly political statement, “Thinking about craft as a real feminist language, that is extremely important. The fact that it’s very much a domestic practice, I find that incredibly empowering. How you create arenas for discussion and advocacy and political frameworks that start in the home, and how they emanate out, is really important.”
Haidar’s Soleless series (2018-2024) features real-life stories of Syrian refugees and their often gruesome experiences on their flights from Syria. The series came about through a three-month artist residency programme with the Deveron Project, which aimed to integrate a group of 120 Syrian refugees into Huntley, a small rural town in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.
Stitched onto the worn-out soles of the shoes these refugees had journeyed in, small, colourful figures portray firsthand accounts of barbaric treatments their erstwhile owners experienced at the hand of Syrian army officers or the real-life horrors of crossing the Mediterranean sea in search of safer shores.
Haidar recalls sitting with some of the Syrian women during her residency and how they slowly opened up to share their experiences, “As we were nursing our children, as our children were playing, as we were cooking together, as we were really genuinely forming organic relationships and connections, this is where the stories surfaced.”
“The point of this work was to humanise, to tell a story that otherwise would never ever get told [...] it’s about shedding light on truths and realities that we are completely oblivious to and [that] we need to share and we need to talk about,” she adds.
A series representing Haidar’s own lived experience is Tolteesh (2019). Curious phrases like, “What’s up custard apple?”, “You’re edible without salt”, or “Hey sweetie, do you come in a Jello flavour?” are stitched onto pieces of colourful fabric in bright colours.
“So tolteesh in Arabic means catcalling or trying to get someone’s attention,” explains Haidar. She recalls that, growing up, she would spend her summers in Lebanon and as she was spending time out in the city with her friends, she would often hear somewhat crude comments from men around the city.
“When I translate them into English, they sound hilarious, they’re really far-fetched, really poetic, but cringey, really quite rancid [...] and so I started writing them down and translating them into English and part of that is disarming them, so actually taking away that power and subverting them and making it comical and humorous [...] they’re a humorous entry point into misogyny, essentially.”
Part of Haidar’s Tolteesh series, a bright red neon installation spelling the words I love you as much as the power cuts daily, features in the Dubai Collection. Haidar recalls, “I thought that had to exist as a neon, because the irony in Lebanon is that we get three hours of electricity a day [...] it talks about Lebanese society, it talks about misogyny, about our men and women’s interaction, but what it serves to do is to also disarm and subvert it.”
Another of Haidar’s more personal series is Highly Strung (2020), created during the Covid-19 pandemic when the artist felt that despite a very equal balance in her household, she saw herself doing most of the work around the house on top of her full-time job. The series consists of 365 everyday household textiles like rags, dishcloths, and discarded items of clothing, each with an act of invisible labour stitched onto it such as, “cleaned fridge”, “produced milk”, or “dusted cobwebs”.
“I priced it at minimum wage times seven days a week, 365 days a year, so the total is what women would earn over a year doing the labour that they do which is completely unvalued,” she explains.
Despite her often heavy subjects, there is a certain lightness and even humour to be found in Haidar’s work, from the softness of carefully embroidered textiles, humorous takes on issues around sexism, and the unexpectedness of seeing a baby onesie embroidered with the words “changed nappy” in a museum setting.
Haidar uses these playful moments as a tool for people to connect with the deeper messages her works convey, “For me, the work sometimes needs a humorous, playful entry point to invite people to come into it and really engage with it and create arenas for discussion around this subject matter.”
“I feel like people switch off when it’s dark and heavy, and people just go, ‘Oh, I can’t!’ But if you fool them into being enticed into something colourful or playful then they’re really faced with it,” she concludes.
You're Edible Without Salt, 2019, 51 x 63 cm, Embroidery on Cotton. Image courtesy the artist.
