Project: Great-grandmother’’s Tattoos, 2011 - ongoing

The Great Grandmother’s Tattoos is an ongoing multidisciplinary project based on a family photograph I took in 2011 on my Nokia phone of my great-grandmother. It is the only surviving image I have of a relative from my clan in Raqqa, in the Euphrates region of Syria, wearing traditional tattoos connected to Shawaya communities. Through pattern making, weaving, textile, installation, illustration, and painting, the project approaches a tattoo tradition that was never fully documented and now survives only in fragments.

Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, I combine archival research, speculation, and artistic interpretation to work with histories shaped by absence, fragmentation, and loss. Hartman introduced critical fabulation as a way of engaging the silences and violence of the archive. For me, it is not only a theoretical framework but also a personal artistic method. Because my memory is fractured by war, trauma, and PTSD, parts of my past remain inaccessible or incomplete. Artistic reconstruction allows me to approach those gaps without claiming certainty, while staying close to what cannot be fully recovered.

The project is rooted in the tattoo traditions connected to my great-grandmother, my clan, and the wider Shawaya communities of the Euphrates region. In this context, tattoos were not only decorative. They could mark kinship, protection, belonging, memory, and different stages of life. Over time, these practices were marginalized through colonization, religious repression, discrimination, urbanization, and assimilation, leaving only partial traces behind.

At the same time, this project understands these traditions within a wider regional history. Related tattoo practices have existed across multiple communities and geographies, including among Amazigh communities in North Africa, in parts of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and across Southwest Asia among Kurdish, Arab, and Bedouin communities. These traditions did not all share the same names, meanings, methods, symbols, or cultural frameworks. Each tribe, clan, region, and community developed its own ways of understanding and practicing them. Reading all of these traditions through a single ethnic lens narrows a much broader and more diverse field of practice.

Rather than attempting a historically exact reconstruction, the project asks how art can create forms through which interrupted and unarchived practices may be approached again. Each work becomes a contemporary response to a tradition that has been broken, while also asking how it might have evolved visually, materially, and socially if it had continued into the present.

The project does not only look back. It proposes contemporary forms through which erased traditions can be encountered again, not as fixed historical facts, but as unfinished cultural possibilities.

The project has developed through different institutional and residency contexts. In fall 2026, I will present its largest works to date, extending this research into new material and spatial forms.

All photos are by Hendrik Zeitler.

Great-grandmother’’s Tattoos, 2024

91 x 76 cm

Digital illustration

Great-grandmother's portrait at age 102, taken by me in 2011, days before ISIS seized Raqqa city.

9 × 7 cm

Digital print on paper

21.0 x 29.7 cm

Colored pencils on paper