Alheraiqi - What inspires you to create? “The only natural talent an artist has is the desire to create.” Even when Qudsia is not creating art, she is always thinking about art. Qudsia - “I jot down ideas for future projects. I watch movie analyses and video essays to get inspired. I look at old family photographs and try to create a composition. I am always thinking about art. I believe there is inspiration around us and our experiences with other people. I am a Pakistani Canadian Muslim woman; even though my art is about my identity and my experiences, I feel like there is a shared experience when people view my work. My work is for everybody. The initial reason I like to create is to have a sense of control and to be in charge of something that is solely mine in the process. I am making something because I want to create. My paintings are an extension of me.”
Dimensions: 24 by 30 inch Medium: Acrylic paint on Canvas with mixed media
'Hope' By Qudsia Hussain
Qudsia Hussain, a Pakistani Canadian Muslim woman, an alumna of the OCAD University, and an artist. Qudsia sees hope in everything, broken things, from old toys, beads, old jewelry, to pieces of fabric, and uses them as potential inspiration for paintings.
"I looked at different archetypes in children's stories/movies for my painting titled Hope. I looked into the stories of Disney princess movies and focused on their journeys. I noticed that birds were a huge part of their journey. In Disney princess movies, the birds are companions of the princess; they help them with their daily tasks, look after them, and most importantly, the birds are routing for them. In this particular painting, I referenced snow white. After snow-white runs away from her home, she finds security in a cottage, there is a scene where she is sitting on the ground singing to animals around her, and she has a bird in her hand as she looks up. I copied her pose. Birds symbolize life, rebirth, freedom, peace, hope, renewal and love. In the end, snow-white is rescued by the prince. I depicted myself in the same pose as snow white in a white shawl in my painting. The white shawl references an archetype in Pakistani drama: a sad young Pakistani religious woman. I referenced Islamic patterns and architecture for the background. I used beads/gems on the bird to symbolize plastic fake hope or wish. I wanted to explore my identity through an archetype that already existed in Disney princess stories for this painting. I wanted to represent my identity and insert myself into archetypes that we are not a part of. My paintings are self-portraits that question and accept my identity/positionality and social archetypes.
My paintings investigate Who I am, What I am and how I am perceived in society. My paintings consist of personal narratives, media references, cultural motifs and childhood nostalgia.”
Dimensions: 16 by 20 inch Medium: Acrylic paint on Canvas
'Qudsia' By Qudsia Hussain
Alheraiqi - What compelled you to paint this piece? Qudsia - “I created those paintings during my last year at art school in my thesis class. For my thesis research, I started looking into media representation and how Muslim women are not being represented correctly and respectively. I wanted to represent my identity with dignity. I started looking into different archetypes in stories and seeing how misrepresented we are. We do not exist in other archetypes. Muslims are given negative archetypes in the media; for example, villains, terrorists, or oppressed Muslim woman needs to be saved by a white saviour. I started looking into how women are depicted in art. I noticed that most women in art are depicted in a resting form, resting over furniture or their head resting on their hands. I was captivated by their melancholy poses of resting; they just existed in their sadness. I noticed that I saw no sad Muslim woman painting. Me painting a sad selfportrait would have different connotations because of my identity. I felt like I couldn't make a sad painting because people would assume it was about my identity and not something else. As an artist who is a Muslim woman, I felt like I couldn't express sadness for the sake of just being sad, and that is what I did with my painting titled Qudsia. I just wanted to paint myself sad, lost in thought."
Alheraiqi - Have these pieces affected your perception of time? Qudsia - "I made these paintings during my thesis. I had eight months to complete my thesis, but I decided to start over halfway in. This decision did affect my perception of time. I felt anxious because I felt like I could not finish these paintings, and it seemed like time was moving fast. When I was almost done with the paintings a week before the graduation exhibition, it seemed like the time was moving slowly. In my paintings, the figures have a sense of time as they are waiting. The painting titled Qudsia is lost in thought and melancholy. When you are lost in thought, time moves fast. In the painting Hope, the figure is waiting for something good to happen." Alheraiqi - Do you ever think life is a race against time? Qudsia - "Yes. I think because of the world's expectations of being successful and setting an age number for specific accomplishments. Life feels like a race against time if you feel you haven't accomplished anything. Sometimes it feels like you don't have enough time for all the things you want to achieve. However, it is important to remember that everyone experiences life at a different pace."
Gracia believes that everyone has their own destiny, “Well, if we talk about mortality, I believe we have our own destiny. I mean, everyone has their own perspective on life and death.” Life is against the race of time, as Gracia said, “We never know our limits, and will we ever get enough time to do what we want? Nobody knows.”
Dimensions: 50 by 70 cm Medium: Mixed media on Canvas
'The Agony of Life and Death' By Gracia
Gracia is a 21 year old artist, studying for a bachelor’s degree majoring in animation at Bina Nusantara University. For Gracia, the main driver of their inspiration is history, but specifically art history. “That’s the thing that inspires me the most. I love to learn the old master techniques and try to combine them with my own style.” Furthermore, what inspired the painting, “The Agony of Life and Death” is Emily Dickinson, after watching the Dickinson series, “I remember reading one of her poems ‘because I could not stop for death’ and I was so fascinated.”
By Amanda Zheng
Untitled Portrait
Amanda Zheng is a seventeenyear-old New Zealand artist who began presenting and sharing her work on social media at the age of thirteen. The work she creates is influenced by her current interests, which include the fashion scene, vogue covers, spirituality, and IT females who impact her style and way of life.
When Amanda was exploring the topic of spirituality in 2021, her grandfather's experience with spirituality and Buddhism piqued her curiosity, prompting her to create this painting. “He inspires me with his unrelenting faith every day and embodies all that I wanted to capture; love, hope, trust, gratitude, and awe. I wanted to illustrate Buddhism and spirituality as the fundamental factor that makes him uniquely whole and builds the framework for his life with integral meaning and devoted relationships. Spirituality is the supremacy of insight over logic, which allows one to experience revelations of the deepest truths. He lives in the present moment and is deeply grateful for the time he has on earth. That is what inspired and drove me to create this piece.” Amanda realized how valuable time is as a resource during the process of creating the piece. “Painting my grandpa who has experienced, lived, and endured more than me, has allowed me to become more aware and to be grateful for the present moment and the time we have now. It also made me realize no one is invincible. We are all reminded of our mortality as we see our parents and our grandparents age with us and it is a crushing feeling to surrender to, however, I feel it teaches us to value every little moment spent with them.”
By Amanda Zheng
Amanda has never felt more connected to the phrase "life is a race against time" than she has recently. She is under a great deal of pressure and stigma to be successful at such a young age and to work hard into her 20s and beyond. “I do stand by that message, hence I am looking to seek discomfort and work harder now that I am young in hopes that it will create a better future for myself, especially coming from a more disadvantaged background. A lot of times we can get caught up in deadlines, assignments and never ending work that sidetrack us from spending valuable time with family or friends. Sometimes I feel like I am sacrificing my younger years or putting relationships on hold because of this 'race against time' feeling. Instead, I try to gain a more positive outlook and view it as a mindset that is in reality beneficial in pushing us to achieve higher and experience more out of life.”
ُم َّط ْخ 'Splotched' / ' ' ل By Rania Eyad
Rania Aqrabawi is an artist who has a strong desire to create and is a recent graduate of the University of Jordan's Visual Arts/Painting program. For her, drawing and painting is a method of describing her feelings without thinking about anything else, as well as expressing her opinions and point of view without fear of being judged. Her inspirations come from anything and everything—from living and being— without boundaries.
By working on this project, Rania has been able to let go of things that were holding her back, “I felt relieved just letting go of what was weighing me down through the liquid dripping from the pomegranate above. I really wanted to see the mental state and emotions I was feeling through that experience. I firstly show the pomegranate so that it forms on top, making it seem that the juice is dripping from it directly over the girl who's sitting under it, she doesn't see it, but she can feel it, without any doubt. The pomegranate here meant by form - is the ultimate model for the transitions between loneliness - the toughness of the outer rind and the seemingly limitless seeds inside.” The seeds represent all the frightful thoughts within me that might have been out there without dating for years and years, but in a moment of indifference (not daring) I decided to cut this hard shell to see what I left there, and here I'm in a moment of regret I can't control what I found inside. Some seeds represent the feeling of satisfaction and change that occurs through this process, while others represent the complete opposite."
"Green spots on the side of the peel that appear without redness or may appear rotten, are intended to show a clear contrast within the pomegranate. These clumps of gemlike seeds make the pomegranate an interesting and semimysterious piece. It's quite interesting that the pomegranate is used historically in topics such as death and more interestingly that was used in other places to pass from death to life, in my point of view, I believe that this death isn't real death but the death of the desire to live, either the transition is the transition from unwillingness to desire.”
'Time and Evolution'
Dimensions: 70 by 100 cm Medium: Charcoal
Magazine Cover Photography and editing, by Reema AlHeraiqi.
Untitled (Time is always passing). Words, by Maryam AlHarithi.
Untitled (They say “live before you die”). Words, by Leena Shagrani.
We live in wonder. Words, by Joory AlAmer.
Tick Tock. Words, by Zahraa AlShubbar Untitled (pink strokes at sunset). Words, by Reema AlHeraiqi 'Hope' and 'Qudsia' by Qudsia Hussain. Interview and writing, by Reema AlHeraiqi. 'The Agony of Life and Death' by Gracia. Interview and writing, by Reema AlHeraiqi. Untitled Portrait by Amanda Zheng Interview and writing, by Reema AlHeraiqi.
ُم َّط ْخ
'Splotched' / ' ' لby Rania Eyad. Interview and writing, by Reema AlHeraiqi. 'Time and Evolution', by Hanna Hussain.
Graphic Design, by Reema Alheraiqi. Thank you.