I am because you know me - A love letter to womanhood
Flowers of Lilith
Gertrude Stein’s “I am because my little dog knows me” speaks to the unique and unfixed nature of identity. Is our sense of self substantiated by the recognition of another? Stein’s little dog represents the love of an other, a space that suspends judgement on the understanding the “I” is a flowing, evolving entity.
Curiosity and interrogation drive our individual practices. In our own ways we seek to understand and appreciate the uneasy dynamics between identity, the mind and the environments in which we are situated. We use the joys and tensions of creating to disrupt a stable and seamless performance of the self and identity, energies that are intricate, boundless, non-propositional. Our backgrounds, places of birth, our potentials and our expectations become the here and now. While we work throughout different media, or utilise resources in similar ways, it is our present – and our time together – that demand and drive our creative exploration.
embodied landscapes
Nadia Magda Abatorab-Manikowska
Nadia Magda Abatorab-Manikowska's ongoing photography series, "woman, land, rewind", explores the deep, instinctual connection between women and nature, drawing on themes of femininity, identity, and belonging. Inspired by the teachings in Women Who Run with the Wolves, the series delves into the archetypal "wild woman," whose wisdom, strength, and resilience reflect the natural cycles of life. The photographs aim to uncover this inner wildness through fluid imagery of natural landscapes, symbolizing the ways in which women’s identities are shaped and reclaimed.
Through this work, Nadia Magda engages with the concept of Common Ground by highlighting shared experiences of womanhood across generations. As women navigate societal expectations and the forces that shape their identities, they connect with one another in ways that transcend time and place. The landscapes in the series reflect this shared ground—inviting empathy, fostering connection, and challenging stereotypes. By presenting these images, Nadia Magda seeks to create a space where viewers can reflect on their own sense of belonging and unity within a larger, interconnected world.
Common Ground becomes both a physical and emotional space, where the universal struggles and triumphs of women are celebrated, and their inherent power is embraced. Through the imagery, Nadia Magda hopes to inspire a collaborative conversation around identity, resilience, and the collective journey toward positive change.
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Dialogues Through Time
Mariam Menteshashvili
This exhibition by documentary photographer and social anthropologist Mariam Menteshashvili explores intergenerational dialogues between women through.
The series centers on her relationships with her grandmother and great-grandmother, captured in the family home in Sighnaghi, a historic town in eastern Georgia. These photographs serve as visual artifacts of her research into intergenerational memories, family albums, and the shared yet distinct experiences of women across generations.
Each image reveals intimate moments, weaving a narrative that connects past and present, memory and identity. By focusing on the domestic space as a site of lived history, Mariam reflects on the power of familial bonds, oral traditions, and the transmission of knowledge between women.
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Orí Inú
Aisha Olamide Seriki
Orí Inú takes from the Yoruba Metaphysical conception “Orí’ which translates to the head and refers to one’s spiritual destiny. Followers of the Yoruba Spiritual tradition ‘Ifa’ believe that all humans pick their spiritual destiny (‘Orí) before entering the world. Orí is one’s personal ‘god’ which follows us through the ups and downs of life, and by working on ourselves both spiritually and physically we can heal ourselves and obtain alignment with our destiny. Using the calabash as a metaphor, Orí Inú depicts my attempts to mend the break between my mind and spirit and realign my destiny. There are no markers of the natural world, to represent my inner consciousness. Orí Inú attempts to show that reconnecting with one’s inner spirit is a continuous endeavour and is a condition of the human experience.
By incorporating optical illusions and tricks within the photographs through the use of mirroring, Orí Inú questions the camera’s historic association as a vessel of truth, challenging colonial understandings of the black body. Stimulated by this history, a series of bronze comb sculptures (Iyarun) containing miniature photographs are in conversation with the larger prints. This is informed by the comb’s relationship with African diasporan histories, where it surpasses functionality to become a cultural symbol of empowerment, ritual and self-care, while simultaneously referencing the history of keepsakes and the deeply personal significance that photographs can hold.
Aisha Olamide Seriki (b 1998) is a Nigerian multi-disciplinary artist in London, specialising in fine art photography and sculpture. Seriki works from a canon of personal histories which splice contemporary realities. Her practice is holistic and embodied, subverting formal photographic traditions. Cosmological systems such as the Yoruba Spiritual Tradition have informed the multisensory approach Seriki has to documentation, communication and creation. Through optics and trickery, she challenges the rigid imagination of self, creating space in the archive for a wider definition.
I am a multimedia artist, specialising in fine art photography, and sculpture. My work delves into the intricate relationship between historical narratives and contemporary realities, utilising the past as a method to comprehend and communicate present-day existence. My practice questions the camera’s historic association as a vessel of truth, by using 19th Spiritualist Photography, Surrealism, and 20th-century mirror trick photography, to challenge photography’s attachment with truth and time. I draw inspiration from a combination of imagination and personal experiences, and through carefully staged photographs, I endeavour to visualise a holistic conception of being, that challenges the colonial imagination of self.
I am concerned with the photograph as a haptic object, this inquiry has expanded my practice beyond photography, through the exploration of materiality and sculpture. Cosmological systems such as the Yoruba Spiritual Tradition have informed my multisensory approach to documentation, communication and creation. The integration of spatial elements into my practice builds on my refusal to conceive of photography as a solely visual experience and my sculptural practice aims to encourage a slow and embodied viewing, where the audience’s spectatorship becomes the final process of activating my work.
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Psycho-geography of the Domestic: Acts of Creation
Elizabeth Maria Pimentel
Eli’s is an expanded social documentary practice that looks at socio-economic dynamics of the technologies of care and domestic work by making visible the labour involved in social reproduction – whether in the raising of children, in social care or in the nursing profession - as essential to human prosperity and continuity.
The works presented here are inspired by social protest movements - of people becoming memory through political acts of solidarity and amity that give material presence to this lifetime of labour which disappears with each passing moment, and that few get to see. This work is qualified as ‘free’, or as low-wage, low-skilled, and does not feature as economically productive within national accounts of the measure of the market value of all goods and services, even though this foundation is indispensable to the running of the economy.
Eli (b. 1975, Dominican Republic) began her career as an economist, working on policy issues concerning human development and material and physical security. Her research and photographic practices centre on visual feminist aesthetic philosophies that explore the mechanisms through which certain demographic groups are not always protected by the legal and socio-political obligations and covenants set out explicitly to safeguard the wellbeing of all members within the social body.
The 1969 slogan ‘the personal is political’ does not deny a distinction between our public and private lives. It does indicate there exist socio-political and economic divisions between public and private discourses through an established orthodoxy that presupposes everyone is entitled to choice and opportunity without restraint, discrimination or bias.
Eli considers photography and sculpture as part of a dynamic and materialist discourse on social reproduction. Her images of feminist protests from the series Ghosts in the Machine sit alongside pithy sculptures that suggest a body engaged in regeneration - gathering, preserving, producing. Household paraphernalia take on multiple guises to provoke an awareness of the meaning of things as central to the relationship with the world.
The tradition of making by hand indicates a visceral awareness of the limits of the body – how weight and form relate to the size of a limb, the look of a truncated torso, or a defeated monumental sad iron. Cast from life, the objects coax us from the comfort of routine into a newly imagined world of things.
Objects are the facts of us, the fetishes of daily life. Objects enhance the materiality of the image, and in turn the physical, and static properties of the objects are made vivid and fluid through a process of ideation. Whereas an object can be named, the thing is what defines our relation to the object.
Looking through objects – an exercise in discharging them from what one believes they convey, or how they ought to function – forces them to reveal what they do. A book that disturbs and makes one wish it had not been read; a lumpy mattress that leaves the frazzled sleeper miserable in the morning; food poisoning: these encounters with thingness are instantiations of an experience with objects, whose purpose has been checked and thwarted by some-thing that provokes the unexpected. This implies the thing itself is an ambiguity. ‘What is that thing?’ is a common reaction to something our understanding or sensibility cannot quite grasp.
Consider Titcaves: Sympoiesis, crochet oviforms from banana fibres. Titcaves. Sympoiesis is a name borrowed from Donna J Haraway’s term for ‘making with’, or creative creation - responsive, receptive, dynamic. The form is inspired by the Taíno pre-Columbian narrative of the origins of the world, a womb-like gourd that, on splitting, unleashes a living web of destruction and conception with feverish diluvial urgency. Titcaves also allude to a beehive, a centre of production and activity - not as a point of origin but as a localised continuation of the way we have always existed in the world: an inverted basket for storing, treasuring and mustering all that is needed to ensure our being-ness.
'The slight curve of the shell that holds just a little water, just a few seeds to give away and to receive, suggests stories of becoming - with, of reciprocal induction, of companion species whose job in living and dying is not to end the storying, the worldling’. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016)
Ursula K Le Guin (The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986) calls the hive an ‘inverted basket’, a vessel for preserving and passing along those things that require love and persistence if they are to grow and prosper.
Read more about Eli's current work on the Arts to Hearts platform
https://artstoheartsproject.com/how-elizabeth-captures-human-strength-to-her-photography/
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