Exhibition
I’m Migrant
Artist: Yamam Nabeel
At the Bermondsey Project Space.
18 - 29 april 2023
https://project-space.london/im-migrant-2
A documentation of five Iraqi artists: Afifa Aleiby, Ghani Alani, Nabeel Yasin, Dia AL-Azzawi, Faisal Laibi Sahi.
I had the pleasure of attending a screening, which was a short documentary, filmed and directed by Yamam Nabeel. It covered the life of Afifa Aleiby through an interview, a well established Iraqi Painter who was one of the five artists Nabeel recorded in his work. As well, Poetry Readings done by both Yamam nabeel, who read in english, and his father Nabeel Yasin, who read in arabic on Saturday 29 April 2023.
The exhibition space was filled with photos, stills from his film documentations, of those five Iraqi artists. It also contained a few of these artist's artworks, some of which were traditional calligraphy and abstract paintings. In a small corner of the space, he projected on a curtain old nostalgic photos of those artists when they were all young and still in Iraq before they were all forced to flee. This project definitely felt personal coming from Nabeel's heart, Piecing together his heritage where he got to explore and live through a lot of those artists' lives, who he calls family.
In the documentary the artist Afifa Aleiby talks about the hardship and prosperity of moving to another country, especially when it's against one’s will. She spoke about how when she moved to Moscow, Russia, everyone helped make her feel at home, even though they didn't speak the same language. She felt she had created a small community for herself. but when she moved to Italy to marry a man she loved, it was one of the hardest experiences of her life. She moved back and forth not just between Italy and Russia but as well as Amsterdam, Yemen and then the UK. She also mentioned her childhood in Iraq and how it felt visiting after decades. The sense of being afloat, ungrounded-ness is a common feeling I felt throughout the viewing. In her experience of being exiled, then constantly moving around looking for a better opportunity is ultimately to find a place to belong and call home. She didn't move around because she liked to travel or wanted to see the world, it was her circumstances in each country that pushed her to go out again and look for another place.
This topic is exactly the kind of narrative that creates these awkward feelings that I am trying to portray through the skins of my fruits. For Afifa Aleiby, not only would I combine a fruit from Iraq and Amsterdam, but i'll give it the skin of a fruit from Russia, the color of Italy and the shape of Yemen. Because every place she had to start all over is forever part of her, what shapes her and now it's embedded into what defines her, her identity.
