‘I went on my own and got sick…’
Turkiyyeh Trilogy
This project is an attempt to express the artist’s nostalgic feelings after migrating to England and abandoning her mobile home; her ‘Abbaya’. Althought she did not care much about “not” wearing it at first, it soon became an anxiety trigger as she constantly saw how it was linked in the public eye to extremism and more often to terrorism. For a while she pretended that this modesty dress does not define her, she had the freedom to abandon it. However, this created a tension of losing her identity, her feeling of homeness. This anxiety was endured by her constant visits to her home country, but in the final 18 months when she could not go home she got sick. As a consequence, she decided to ease this tension by searching for visual representations of home in the archives of England. Old images of the Arabian Peninsula showing different types of tents, men wearing cloaks, Bedouin and urban women wearing different forms of the veil reassured the artist’s identity.
During the process, she found ‘Turkiyya’ at the Gertrude Bell Archive in Newcastle University. There were many pictures of a woman from Hail/Saudi Arabia left all alone in a cold drawer. The letters of Gertrude Bell tell us that ‘Turkiyya’ was stolen as a young girl and sold in the slave market in Turkey, then moved from one house to another until she reached her final destination where she met Gertrude Bell. The irony is that it was not the first time the artist saw this picture. Saudis for years have circulated ‘Turkiyya’ image on the internet mistaking her for another woman. Many have claimed that she was their grandmother, but no one ever mentioned who she really was or told her real story, although it was all along waiting at the archive. Apparently, her image was a trigger of an identity crisis and nostalgic feelings for many Saudis, not just the artist!
But now since she knows who she really was, she decided to take her with her everywhere she goes. Both, Turkiyya and the artist, were no longer feel weird for being different. They shall stay together until it is time to go back home again.
During the process, she found ‘Turkiyya’ at the Gertrude Bell Archive in Newcastle University. There were many pictures of a woman from Hail/Saudi Arabia left all alone in a cold drawer. The letters of Gertrude Bell tell us that ‘Turkiyya’ was stolen as a young girl and sold in the slave market in Turkey, then moved from one house to another until she reached her final destination where she met Gertrude Bell. The irony is that it was not the first time the artist saw this picture. Saudis for years have circulated ‘Turkiyya’ image on the internet mistaking her for another woman. Many have claimed that she was their grandmother, but no one ever mentioned who she really was or told her real story, although it was all along waiting at the archive. Apparently, her image was a trigger of an identity crisis and nostalgic feelings for many Saudis, not just the artist!
But now since she knows who she really was, she decided to take her with her everywhere she goes. Both, Turkiyya and the artist, were no longer feel weird for being different. They shall stay together until it is time to go back home again.