MOJEH published a profile of Aya Haidar, written by Amia Hasheel, examining how the Lebanese-British textile artist's embroidery practice engages with resistance, feminism and the preservation of craft traditions. The piece appeared as her work responding to the war in Gaza was being shown in Dubai, and drew on a conversation with the artist about her methods and motivations.
The article discusses Final Goodbye, a 2024 embroidered piece showing a woman embracing a shrouded child, shown at Tabari Artspace in response to the situation in Gaza. It also covers Safe Spaces, a 2023 series of embroidery hoops built from the artist's mother's memories of Lebanon's civil war, first exhibited in Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, and Highly Strung, the 2020-21 durational project of 365 embroidered household textiles documenting a year of unpaid domestic labour, later acquired by Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Haidar is quoted telling the magazine, "Men fight with swords, women fight with the needle."
The piece situates this Gaza-related work within Aya Haidar's wider practice of hand-stitching testimony onto domestic objects, and points to her presentation in Hot Spots at Tabari Artspace, the group exhibition in which her recent embroidered pieces were shown alongside work by Adel El Siwi, Almaha Jaralla and Béchir Boussandel.
