rough as silk
hiba ali – 2022
“Silk has multilayered meanings for Hiba Ali who traces home and belonging across the map of the Swahili-Indian Ocean. Their work encompasses, and mediates the experiences of separation and entanglement, of living here and remembering/desiring another place[s].”
Entering the green glowing doorways, Hiba Ali’s work is a portal that invites us to inhabit the figure of the silkworm. This video maps family stories that feature Swahili-Indian Ocean afterlives including the Sufi Saint, Bava Gor, “roshan rui’, the cyclone, SwahiliIndian Ocean servitude and slavery and the role of silk in the Swahili-Indian Ocean world—their work maps “a constellation of responses to dwelling-in-displacement.” Ali’s work invokes the Swahili-Indian Ocean trade and commerce networks that brought forced migrations from the African continent to Asia, over millennia.
Silk has multilayered meanings for Hiba Ali who traces home and belonging across the map of the Swahili-Indian Ocean. Their work encompasses, and mediates “the experiences of separation and entanglement, of living here and remembering/desiring another place[s].”
The artist’s work holds the past in remembrance and yearns to link up the diverse threads of travels, fabric, music and locations that linger in the artist’s inner spiritual and mental geography. The green we see in the rough as silk video, vinyl, tapestry and wall is sampled from a 1680-85 Persian miniature portrait of Sidi Masud Khan, an East African enslaved military soldier. In the seventeenth century, demonstrating extraordinary military skills, Masud rose to the rank of military general and ruler, in the Southern Indian province of Andhra Pradesh, a region that part of Ali’s family hails from.
rough as silk was on display in the State of Flux Gallery from July 2, 2022 to July 29, 2022.
Photos by Chris Miner.
About the Artist
hiba ali
hiba ali is a producer of moving images, sounds, garments and words. they reside in many time zones: chicago, toronto and eugene. born in karachi, pakistan, they belong to east african, south asian and arab diasporas. they are a practitioner and (re)learner of swahili, urdu, arabic and spanish languages.
they work on two long term art and publication projects: the first being an art-based phd project that examines womyn of colour’s labour, and architecture of surveillance as it exists within the monopoly of amazon (corp.) and the second being a series of works that addresses music, cloth and ritual practices that connect east africa, south asia and the arabian peninsula in the swahili-indian ocean region.
note: the use of lowercase on this site denotes a turn away from egotism embedded in the english language (danah michele boyd, “what’s in a name?”) and towards ideas of the collective (bell hooks, “teaching community: a pedagogy of hope”) and reminds us of the many realities, names and glyphs that cannot be said in such a colonial language.