Great-grandmother’s Tattoos, 2026, Vänersborg’s konsthall, © Hendrik Zeitler

Project: Great-grandmother’’s Tattoos, 2024 - ongoing

The Great Grandmother’s Tattoos is an ongoing multidisciplinary body of work that draws on a rare family photograph, the only surviving image I have of a relative bearing traditional Bedouin tattoos. Through sculpture, weaving, textile, installation, illustration, and painting, the project explores how art can be used to reconstruct and reimagine cultural practices that were never fully documented and have been largely erased from public memory. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of Critical Fabulation, the work moves between archival research, speculation, and artistic interpretation in order to approach histories marked by absence, fragmentation, and loss.

The project focuses on tattoo traditions, particularly those worn by my great-grandmother and clan. My family is from Raqqa in northern Syria and belongs to a wider tribal network extending across Southwest Asia and North Africa. Within these communities, tattoos carried meanings beyond ornament. They could signal affiliation, life stages, protection, memory, and social identity. Over time, however, these traditions were suppressed and marginalized through colonization, religious repression, discrimination, urbanization, and cultural assimilation, leaving only fragments behind.

Rather than attempting a historically exact reconstruction, the project asks a different question: how can we create an archive for practices that were never formally archived? In response, I use art as a method for producing new forms through which these lost traditions can be approached, translated, and reimagined. Each work becomes a contemporary expression of a practice that has disappeared, while also asking how it might have evolved visually, materially, and socially had it survived into the present.

Through this process, the project does not simply look backward. It proposes contemporary artistic forms in which erased traditions can be encountered again, not as fixed historical facts, but as living cultural possibilities.