Hayaty Diaries’ ‘I Forgot What You Felt Like’ Highlights Four Female Middle Eastern Artists
LONDON — Female-led collective Hayaty Diaries, founded by Kinzy Diab and Christina Shoucair, has opened “I Forgot What You Felt Like,” an exhibition which will run until Tuesday.
Staged in a little gallery off of Hyde Park on 32 Connaught Street, the exhibition features works from Middle Eastern artists Raya Kassisieh, Zahra Holm, Huda Jamal and Yasmina Hilal, each a reminiscence of the past.
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“The vision for this exhibition began with its title. ‘I Forgot What You Felt Like’ was a line I wrote down one afternoon as a passing thought,” Shoucair said.
“The words seemed to perfectly capture the complex emotions of forgetting and remembering, of drifting apart and then finding our way back – ideas we had been discussing as potential starting points for a future exhibition,” she added.
Diab said the artists expressed the themes in the showcase “through memories of loved ones, pivotal moments of self-awareness, and explorations of identity formation in the context of migration or displacement.”
Jamal’s striking paintings capture women — anxiously sitting on a bed in one, bleeding out on a pink and white checkerboard floor in another — set against swirling cotton candy-colored backgrounds, a reflection on intimate relationships.
A visceral mask of a face caught mid-scream is from multidisciplinary artist Kassisieh’s oeuvre, her work an emotional reconciliation with her identity and family history.
Other works on display include Holm’s undulating pastels, a sensory depiction of her relationship with her changing body as a new mother.
Hilal took the concept of rediscovery seriously, revisiting unfinished works from 2022 and 2023, such as a delicate analogue image surrounded in a brutalist metal frame, and completing them for the exhibit.
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