Daughters of Infinite Women is an ongoing research and production project that examines the positionality of women through my experience as a contemporary Muslim Egyptian woman.
Questions of presentation and communication come up to demand we reconsider our beliefs and to recontextualize ourselves. Sometimes to speak is to die, staying silent could feel as punishing as being locked in a tomb, and a death could spur a wave, a downpour, an avalanche of words. The decision whether to speak or to die is as old as the feminized totems the sculpture is modeled after, and as imperative as the hands on the forehead holding the body together.
Daughters of Infinite Women is an ongoing series that explores how bodies and hair can be used as means of representation and communication, as tools of power and oppression, through the familiar, everyday medium of textile. I Cut It So It Doesn’t Break My Neck utilizes hair as a symbol of power divorced from the body that grew it. Hair, as light as it can be, trails weight behind it and all knotted up in it. Sometimes, the best way to handle such a burden is to cut it off.
Artist | Rawan Abbas 