hello everyone out there and thank you for joining the McMaster Museum of Art
online to celebrate culture days 2020, a
national celebration of arts and culture. The theme this year is connecting
community and it's my pleasure to introduce to you
artist Hiba Abdallah.
Hiba, welcome! Today we'll talk about your provocative
and poignant text-based works that engage both specific neighborhoods
and the cities you work in, in particular your growing relationship
to the city of Hamilton through recent presentations at super crawl
Center 3 and now the McMaster Museum of Art.
So, before we begin our conversation i'll introduce you a little bit more formally...
Hiba your projects are embedded in social practice and often use
text as a way of exploring topics of locality and civic agency.
You received your BFA from the University of Windsor in 2012
and your MFA from the University of Guelph in 2017.
Your work at last year's Hamilton Supercrawl "In Retrospect"
was presented in association with McMaster Museum of Art
in support of public art initiatives at McMaster University
and throughout the city of Hamilton. today the McMaster Museum of Art is very
pleased to announce the opening of your work
"we remain profoundly and infinitely connected," installed on
the museum's facade and part of the museum's permanent
collection. Yeah! I'd like to take the opportunity right
now to acknowledge that McMaster University
sits on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations
and within the lands protected by the dish with one spoon
wampum agreement.
So about this work, just to introduce it briefly -- you'll talk more
about it I'm sure -- you've said that "the McMaster
Museum of Art is a beacon of engagement and learning
both on campus and with the public at large.
When thinking about the role this institution holds in the community,
i wanted to create a statement that emphasizes human connectivity
as a reciprocal feedback loop. The text created in white neon on a matte gray
background is simple yet evocative of the complex nature of connection
as evidenced in the very subject studied on campus,
from quantum physics to political science, to visual art and biochemistry.
My hope is for this piece to function as a welcoming prompt
when entering the museum during the day and a poetic declaration of unity
at night." Amazing! So Hiba, welcome and thank you for joining me for this
virtual conversation in celebrations culture days
and to launch your work at the McMaster Museum of Art. It's very exciting
Yeah, I'm so excited. Thank you so much for having me. Awesome. So i'll jump right
in... question number one: To begin, would you please tell me more
about your practice and working in and with communities?
Sure. So, i've been working now just a little bit over a decade
in this realm that in the art world we kind of call
social engagement. And so what that means is that
a lot of my projects are based around collaborations with
others and sometimes that's other artists
or other creative practitioners, but a lot of times it's
other community members in different communities across
canada and north america. So what that means is that usually the project
will then be led by the people that i'm working with and the issues or the
stories or the ideas or subjects that they think are most important for me
to focus on or to think about as an artist.
So it's a very kind of like back and forth,
give and take relationship which again kind of relates to what you just said.
And introducing the new piece that mcmaster has, it's like this feedback
loop, so I kind of see social engagement as this
constant feedback loop of i give a little you give me something
and we kind of are going back and forth almost like a tennis match
until we land on something collectively
that usually takes the form of you know in the case of my practice a text-based
work. So that could be a book. That could be a big kind of
public installation like what we saw at the super crawl.
It can be a series of community dinners.
It really depends on the shape that we collectively decide on and so i've
been working in this way like i said for the last few years. And I
started in Windsor with a collective called Broken City Lab
and we were really working to try and understand the intersections
of where art and civic responsibility intersect
and so that was kind of my starting point and now
i'm based in toronto and i'm continuing to work in
various communities. So your relationship with Hamilton did begin actually in 2012,
like you say, as part of the Broken City Lab
collective's exhibition "Two Tales of the City" at the Hamilton Artist's Inc.
So can you tell me about this and this subsequent work that you've done in
Hamilton and that weaving in and out of this city
which you feel is so much like the city you're from
Windsor. Yeah, so like you said my relationship with Hamilton started a
long time ago and it's always quite interesting to travel to
other cities to do work you feel of course like a guest. It's
very different than than making for me making work in
Windsor, which is where i grew up ,so i feel like i almost have a little bit
more like agency or i know the kind of
like fabric of the city more intimately so i
feel like i have ownership over it in a
different way. So it was interesting when i first came
to Hamilton, I immediately drew so many similarities
but of course Hamilton also has like so many unique
characteristics as well. But the biggest thing that stood out was that they're
both like post-industrial cities right? So
it was interesting to kind of dive in and do some research around
how Hamilton's narrative and story is shaped around like steel industry
but also its really really strong textile industry.
And so Two Tales of a City was a way of actually bringing forth the history of
the textile industry in Hamilton which seems to
always be in the shadow steel even though it's still such a rich
part of Hamilton. And so, essentially, we
you know spent i think at least two months researching and
making trips back and forth between Windsor and Hamilton
to try and understand this history better and then at the Hamilton Artists
Inc. we made like a textile text piece
on the side of the building. The messages were changing
every single week to reflect that history
and so i think from that point on I was just still so fascinated by Hamilton,
fascinated to its proximity of Toronto and how that
affects its relationship. And so at any opportunity, I got to come
back to Hamilton to do something whether it was a workshop or another project
i always said yes because i just there's something that's um
very special about the city and also very complex
that i find myself really drawn to. So question number three, which i have
to ask, because it's very timely. so your work is about language and
captures both the simplicity and complexity of how we all relate in
the world during this covet 19 pandemic: What do
you think the response to your work has been
now that it's ever so poignant? Yeah, so that's been really kind of
fascinating for me to experience, because that's sort of why
i'm so drawn to language. It's so pointed but it can also be so
vague and poetic and i think that that's also the beauty
but also the danger of language. The words that we use are very important.
It's how we communicate as a species. It's you know and of course
there's the complexity of languages that we can also get into so like
there's all these different like matrixes of
how languages intersect, but also how a word can mean something now and
then mean something different tomorrow. And i've always been interested in that
idea of like how language shifts throughout time.
So the perfect example being now that we're in Covid
and this billboard that i did for the super crawl,
you know, that's been up since like way before COVID
but of course its context has shifted now that our social
context has shifted and so it's been really fascinating you know? Getting
messages from people who see it in Hamilton and they reach
out to me and they're like you know, how did you know? or like and
i'm like well, you know, this this message to me was
still relevant back in like September 2019 when it went up.
but now its context just means something
different, because of this moment. And like
maybe a year from now if someone looks back on the images of it
they'll think it means something completely different. And i really like
that flexibility of language and i feel similarly about this new
commission at the McMaster Museum of Art because
this started last year but of course it's launching now and so
again its context has shifted, right? but i think that that's just kind of the
beauty of it and also the challenge of it.
Yeah, for sure. I was going to ask you another sort
of unscripted question i just thought of now.
As you move, as we move towards the future
do you see any changes in your work that might happen because of this pandemic?
i mean it's definitely changed the way that i
get to work with people right so it's really
uh presented a challenge for socially engaged artist community
engaged artists because our work is based off of that
and so finding different ways to connect with people -- you know, we're talking over
zoom right now, but in a lot of different scenarios
that's not like possible. So there's also like that kind of challenge
to overcome. so of course i'm sure it will, it already
has changed the way that i have to make work
because we're just not able to be
in the same space but it's also created this really interesting
arena or space to think about connectivity
and how and what like human resiliency looks
like, the way that we're able to adapt to really
difficult and challenging times but stay connected you know and stay -- and i don't
mean just like through the internet i mean like
emotional connectivity. So that's been really interesting to to
think about and reflect on but also experience throughout this pandemic
and i'm sure will have lasting effects. And of course this affects all artists.
It's not inclusive to me in any way but um i just think because i work so
closely with people it's definitely posed a different kind
of set of challenges. Yeah, for sure.
So thank you Hiba and we'll uh we'll be in touch soon and thank you for
giving us such a beautiful work of art at the museum -- especially
when we can't be open it gives people something to look at
without having to go in the building. Thank you so much and i'm so
grateful and happy i got to work with the museum. It's been such a fantastic
opportunity and time spent working with the museum and coming up
with this work so thank you