5 Questions with Shireen Taweel
Shireen Taweel’s artistic practice draws from the personal experiences of being a Lebanese-Australian living between cultures, and how the physical spaces within her community reflect a complex cultural landscape of transformation expressed through hybridity and plurality.
Shireen’s acquisition of traditional coppersmith artisan skills is a research vessel for community—focused conceptual development and a manipulation of the traditional acts of making that leads to possibilities of cross-cultural discourse, opening dialogues of shared histories and fluid community identities.
(Shireen Taweel, tracing transcendence, 2018, pierced copper, photo by Kai Wasikowski for 4A Centre forContemporary Asian Art, courtesy the artist)
No.1
Do you have any early memories of knowing you wanted to be an artist? How did you come to be interested in incorporating coppersmithing in your work?
As a kid, my world wasn’t exposed to anything remotely close to the arts, such as visiting galleries or museums. However, I certainly was influenced from a very young age by the Islamic decorative arts within my local environment, where I’d draw geometric patterns on recycled cards and insist on installing them in a collage-like way all across the living spaces within our home.
My interest in working with copper comes from the inherent value my mother instilled in me from a young age: about the importance of our cultural heritage and the sophistication of the various handmade objects within the household that she had collected and brought over from Lebanon and Syria. Being interested in sculpture during my studies at art school, I was naturally drawn to experimenting with the material, which is so hands-on.
Though I had no formal training in coppersmithing, I soon found a delicate link between the processes of the material and my conceptual work within cultural exchange and transformation, which has drawn me to push this medium within my work.
No.2
tracing transcendence is inspired by the first mosque constructed in the remote South Australian landscape of Marree and a subsequent mosque in Broken Hill in the 1860s. How do you think this work speaks to the past, where do you see the connections in terms of time?
The connections of time is key to tracing transcendence. What I found most compelling in the development of my work is the link between these spaces of hybridity and a coming together of diverse cultural practices within the Australian cultural landscape that the first mosques situated in the outback make clear, and how these qualities have carried through to the sacred spaces of prayer and worship for Islamic communities across our cities today.
For me, it was about understanding the great conviction of the cameleer community of the late 19th century. Despite having no architectural skills, their intent was to establish a space in their new home for their community—which for them meant building these unique mosques in Marree, Broken Hill and Alice Springs, where they expressed a beautiful local harmony of place and cultures coming together through their use of vernacular materials such as with local timbers, corrugated iron and pressed tin as infrastructure for their sacred spaces. Today I see a direct parallel in this kind of cultural harmony with newly developed mosques in Punchbowl, Western Sydney and Newport, Melbourne.
No.3
What kind(s) of conversations—be that cross-cultural or within your community—do you hope will come out of tracing transcendence?
As much as this project has been a critical exploration into how these hybrid structures result from cultural exchange, the work also celebrates how minority communities map a rich cultural landscape across Australia, where non-secular spaces offer a sense of faith, rootedness and belonging.
tracing transcendence invites dialogue around the fluidity of time experienced between past and present, and the value of the mosque in the Australian landscape for the future.
No.4
In your evocative essay ‘How I learned coppersmithing in Gaziantep’ for Garland magazine, you share your experiences about the craft and the intricacies that come with it. It seems you are expressing a sense of duality in that you’re making something unique but in a community setting, which I feel sometimes gets lost when we talk about art. Can you speak more to this?
My experiences within the arts has always come from an engaged sense of dialogue and sharing. The workshops I have been hosting in conjunction with my exhibitions and research are an inseparable part of my practice.
By working with the next generation of Australian artists, I am maintaining a connection with the community. It is important to remain rooted in a hands-on social aspect, as sometimes art making can become disconnected and theoretical. With an art practice that traverses cultures physically, it is important for me to bring the knowledge back to present it to young artists early in their education as a source of experience.
This extends to why diversity within the arts is extremely important to me, and so providing a point of contact and reference for young artists early in their study can help them to access a mentor. By incorporating cultural heritage, it opens them up to how different processes and materials from diverse histories can be brought into their own practice for the future.
My processes are based in the traditional artisan skills of the coppersmithing communities of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. The history of the community has always been to pass on the knowledge and skills to future generations of artisans, to keep the practice alive. So I am maintaining this element in my own practice by passing on the history of the trade with some of the basic techniques; and at the same time, applying it to concepts and ideas relevant today within an art context, rather than the historical decorative object-focused trade of the artisan.
No.5
What are you working on next?
I’ve been developing a body of work that unpacks and reconstructs the cultural practice of code-switching that comes with speaking multiple languages. Language in my community has always been fluid, where we constantly switch between Arabic, English and French—all within one sentence! It’s led to my curiosity in considering what our use of language will continue to evolve into, and I’ve explored these ideas through making a series of copper tablets, sculptures and an installation, playing with several directional sound sculptures. This project (titled Switching Codes) will be my next solo show, open from November 7th at Fairfield City Museum and Gallery.
(Shireen Taweel, tracing trancendence, pierced copper process shot. Image by Eloise Fuss)
Holding Patterns is a four-part solo exhibition series held at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art from 9 July - 23 October 2020.
Based in Sydney, 4A is an independent not-for-profit organisation that fosters excellence and innovation in contemporary culture through the commissioning, presentation, documentation and research of contemporary art. 4A presents various programs throughout Australia and Asia to ensure that contemporary art plays a central role in understanding and developing the dynamic relationship between Australia and the wider Asian region.
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