Great-grandmother’s Tattoos, 2025

230 x 150 cm

Digital illustration printed on cotton, hand-sewn, viscose fringes, a hand-painted and carved wooden beam, and sewn by Jonas Jönsssn.

This rug presents a fabulated portrait of my great-grandmother as a young woman in Raqqa, Syria. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, the work approaches a visual and cultural memory that survives only in fragments and is at risk of further disappearance through displacement, assimilation, and cultural homogenization. The symbols and decorative forms along the rug’s border are drawn from the tattoos once worn on her body, marks connected to Shawaya communities of Raqqa and the Euphrates region, where tattooing could carry meanings of identity, memory, protection, and belonging.

Because these traditions were not fully preserved through formal archival systems, the project uses art to create another way of holding and transmitting memory. The rug is a tribute to the women who carried history on their skin and offers a counter image to simplified or fixed representations of tribal culture in the region. Hand-sewn by Jonas Jönsson, the work resists forgetting by approaching these traditions not as static artifacts of the past, but as living forms that can still be reimagined in the present.