Harmony in fabric
The Dubai International Women’s Club showcases a collection of hand-crafted collaborative tapestries in a DSF-allied exhibition, Social Fabric, at the Majlis Gallery, Dubai. Rajeev Nair has the details
Photographs: Prashanth Mukundan
Nobody, nothing, really changes. For mankind, life — yesterday, today and tomorrow — is an essential cycle of birth and death, love and hatred, little joys and sorrows, hope and frustrations… and whatever the changes one may witness, they are cosmetic, outward, the inevitable frills of development.
That poignant observation on life by Mariam Behnam, stemming from about “75 to 80 years” of living in Dubai, serves as more than a footnote to ‘Social Fabric,’ an exhibition of handcrafted collaborative tapestries on display at the Majlis Gallery in Bur Dubai. Indeed, her words define the true core of the event.
As senior advisor to the Dubai International Women’s Club (DIWC), the organisers of the exhibition, Behnam adds: “At heart, we are still human beings who love friends, who need friends and who like to be together…”
Togetherness — that is the underlying message of Social Fabric, a statement on universal solidarity, springing from the bosom of Dubai, presented to the world at the most opportune of all times — the Dubai Shopping Festival — when the world comes to Dubai, as one happy family.
Hosted away from the city’s festive din, in the wind-kissed silence of a bastakia, where time pauses in yesterday’s memories, Social Fabric offers glimpses into the past — pertinently on the Arab world but not constrained to the region. Here, the past holds the key to a better understanding of today, and serves as a poignant reminder to the future. The past — brought to life by nimble fingers, a collective mind-set and the sheer pleasure of teamwork.
Behnam is qualified to do the flashbacks. After all, she has seen Dubai shape — from vast deserts to today’s galloping metropolis. The physical changes to the city don’t rattle her: She accepts it as the inevitability of modernity but she happily adds: “Any progressive country has to move up the ladder, but side by side, Dubai has also been thinking of the past. The DSF is not just about shopping; it implies culture, it is about bringing people together. Dubai has blended the past and the present and that is its beauty.”
And if there is one aspect of living she has learnt from all her life experiences, that is the value of togetherness, “wherever we may live,” which reverberates in the Social Fabric exhibition.
Its inspiration is seeded in the historic panels that decorated Victoria and Albert Museum’s Moghul Tents Project in London. It was a venue of expression for the South Asian women in England to demonstrate their embroidery skills; the project soon grew in universal stature.
Behnam, who was invited to view the exhibition in 1993, inspired the DIWC members to work on the first ever tapestry from the Middle East. Created with the assistance of Tina Ahmed, a premier UAE artist, the DIWC work, Open Door, indeed opened doors for Dubai to the world of hand-crafted tapestries.
Proffering glimpses of Dubai’s evolutionary past — the dhows, nets, camels, the traditional attire — the tapestry presents a door that opens into modern Dubai, breathtaking now with its skyscrapers. Above, an Emirates airline flies through the skies.
The idea, Behnam humbly adds, was hers; she revels in blending the old and the new. “The tapestry was demonstrative of how different nationalities can work together and live together, regardless of differences and bound by a common goal,” recalls Behnam. The panel was so well received in the UK that it inspired a few college girls from Dubai, who worked with Tina Ahmed, to create a second panel, Al Dallal, meaning necklace. It portrays a bride’s entire ensemble.
It too was displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Behnam was asked to speak on the cultural and historical background of the region — an added honour for DIWC and Dubai. Both Open Door and Al Dallal toured the world extensively before they were returned to DIWC in year 2000.
DIWC had organised an exhibition of the panels along with a few others from Victoria and Albert Museum as part of DSF a few years back. It was the first of its kind experience to Dubai residents.
Now, Social Fabric builds further on it by showcasing four additional panels created by Zainab Al Habashi, Veena Asnani, Alka Katyal, and DIWC’s own 12-member team. Complementing the experience are seven “fabrications” — original artwork created in fabric — by Mara Thorson, a professor at the University of Sharjah.
A school art teacher, Habashi’s work is an Egyptian wall hanging portraying the familiar symbols of Egypt; Veena Asnani, a homemaker, creates Indian women at work, an immensely evocative piece; and Alka Katyal, also a school art teacher, recreates the splendour of a Rajasthani puppet-show, replete with colourful shawls and a snake-charmer.
Harmony depicts women of different nationalities, and celebrates DIWC’s motto of love, friendship, dedication and yes, harmony. Behnam brought the members together, inspiring, encouraging and co-ordinating them.
Mara Thorson’s works are spectacular expressions, all the more noteworthy for the fact that they are made from textile scrap, which she collects from tailors. She used to spin wool and natural-dye them back home in the US, but since relocating to Sharjah some six years back, she had switched to tapestries, defining her art as “fabrication.” She is inspired by her own land as well as the countries she has traveled.
Thorson prefers to work with scrap clothes. “Otherwise you have to spent time shopping, looking for the right material. When you use scrap, it dictates your creativity and thus, there is a certain freedom in the limitation itself.”
She sketches what she has to depict but “if the fabric is not right, the piece would change, and that is the fun of it for me,” says Thorson, who had contacted DIWC seeing a press report inviting tapestries for the show.
The Majlis Gallery was an obvious choice for an exhibition of this nature, says Behnam. “Personally, I am sentimentally involved with bastakias. I was born into one of these. Allison (the Majlis Gallery founder) has done a unique service to the community by keeping history alive, under one roof.” It was a meeting with Allison that sparked the name of the exhibition too: Social Fabric.
Eventually, the event is hoped to win DIWC a permanent place for craftspeople to work together, says Behnam. “We want our women to come and do their age-old art and crafts. It is way of realising our roots…It’s not without reason that we refer to family trees, we have to put together our roots, our branches, to realise how relevant we are as people.”
Behnam says she believes in women as spokespersons for peace and harmony. “Women believe in bringing up their children as good citizens of the world. I have faith in women. I want more of them to work together on events of common interest.”
Suzan Walsh, one of the contributors to the DIWC panel, Harmony, says the whole experience of creating it was joyful. “No one was pressed to do anything; we just loved to work on the panels. We became good friends and we discovered aspects of each other that we didn’t know.”
Sounding off on Behnam; she has only one request to make — to the young and the old: “Please be more humble. This greed for power and money has to stop. As for this world, there should be a place, where people can work together, thinking not of themselves but of others.”
When Social Fabric curtains down and the DIWC dream of a permanent location for artists and crafts-people to work together eventually materialises, perhaps, that dream of the perfect place too would have come true…
