I met Habiba El-Sayed over video chat for the first time, and what struck me was how easy it was. Video introductions are often difficult—awkwardness sits between you as an unwanted third guest. In meeting El-Sayed, however, I found that awkward feeling slipped away quickly and with little protest. This was in part due to the fact that I spent hours prior to our conversation falling in love with her work, so I felt like I knew her a little bit already, and in part because of the easy grace and kindness that El-Sayed carried through our conversation. Talking to her felt like immediate kinship. She’s built a practice that makes space for the feelings that have always sat under the surface for me as a Pakistani woman growing up in so-called Canada.
El-Sayed is a Toronto-based artist, working primarily in ceramics and performance. She takes a visually and technically diverse approach to ceramics, combining it with performance to help express emotion that she feels sculpture alone can’t always convey. She considers her practice a combination of hard and soft mediums, built with the intention of capturing the way the Western gaze influences her life and the lives of those around her. As a Muslim woman, her work often pulls from the canon Islamic architectural motifs, combined with Western ideas, to think about grief and anger in tender, honest ways.
As an artist who has been exploring ceramics and performance for over eight years, the progression of her work across this time is clear. Khaima/Khimar (2014) was one of the first pieces I was drawn to. It feels like a clear beginning to the themes she explores deeper in more recent years. I’m immediately drawn to the traditional white and blue of the glazed ceramic piece, and the work brings about an intense sense of nostalgia within me. The name is a relationship between khaima, meaning tent, and khimar, which is a type of head covering, connecting ideas of protection, and thinking about skin as a fabric, and as something that is vulnerable to elements. The marks on the piece are done with a pin tool, mimicking a tattooing action, creating small, but deliberate, marks to adorn it. The piece moves from blue glaze on a white ceramic to more flesh-colored tones. The red tinge thinks about the body, the ways our bodies are marked by trauma and grief, and the ways we hide/ show these wounds. The work creates a direct connection to ideas of skin, and covering, and pulls from El Sayed’s feelings on the hijab: “The hijab was a protection for me, but it also made me more vulnerable as a Muslim woman in a post-9/11 world, as I stood out more.” 1 I think about this idea a lot. As someone who grew up in a Muslim household, I have often thought about the ways I choose to present my relationship to Islam to a white society. The hijab’s intention is safety, but it can also create a spotlight, and is intensely politicized. When we talk, El Sayed describes the way that women are often thought of as both victims and villains, and the hijab is an excellent example of this. It’s supposed to be a means of safety and protection, but instead has been made into a tool of oppression, a touchstone for racist anger. When I look at this work, I feel seen. El-Sayed has captured the grief and frustration that so many marginalized women feel in a society co-opted by whiteness.
Image description: A studio shot of a glazed, bulbous ceramic sculpture that stands on golden feet. At the top is a two-dimensional, ornate crown. The sculpture is ridged, indicating a hand-made process. There are hints of blue glaze where tiny dots puncture the surface in a repeated, triangular pattern.
Above: Habiba El Sayed, Khaima/Khimar, 2014. Ceramics. Image courtesy of the artist.
Image description: A studio shot of a glazed ceramic sculpture that stands on golden feet. At the top is a two-dimensional, ornate crown. The sculpture is bulbous and ridged, indicating a hand-made process. Tiny dots puncture the surface in a repeated, triangular pattern. There are also clusters of dots which imply that light can shine through this sculpture.
As her practice shifts through time, her newer work tends to centre performance. Ceramics are still a part of these works and serve to provide conceptual context to the performance. Destruction of a Chaise Lounge (2018) is a great example of how El-Sayed continues to explore her right to take up space through a new and ongoing relationship with performance. In this work, El-Sayed has built a chaise completely out of raw clay. In a two-hour performance, she lays on the chaise, with a digital projection overlaid. The projection is a GIF of Orientalist female nudes where the figure is constantly being manipulated, removed, and re-added until it takes over the whole field. As she lays on the chaise, she mimics the poses of the reclining nudes, referencing the Odalisque, pointing to ideas of fetishization and the Western gaze.
Image description: Habiba El-Sayed is positioned on top of a raw clay sculpture of a chaise. She is dressed in a black shirt and pants which are dirtied by the clay. A red scarf is wrapped over her hair. Her feet are bare. She is leaning into one elbow, reclining with her torso twisted towards a projection screen which shows an image of a reclining female nude. The raw clay sculpture is caving-in near her feet.
As she shifts on the chaise over the course of the performance, the raw clay breaks down and disintegrates until it is eventually flattened, and she is posing on its remnants. “The chaise serves as a pedestal,” 2 El-Sayed explains, “It represents the ways the female figure is posed by white men, and the prevalence of Orientalism in media and porn. These tropes go back hundreds of years, but the repercussions are very current and influential to the way we are viewed.” This work asks the question: what does it mean to destroy the pedestal, to reject these ideals completely? The anger of this piece is translated directly into El-Sayed’s manipulation of sculpture and the way she creates this chaise and interacts with it to intentionally break it down.
The trajectory of El-Sayed’s practice is incredibly relatable, and has moved through what so many Muslim women in Canada face. Her practice has moved into a place of fierce honesty, hope, anger, and grief, and sharing in these works gives me space to put that grief down for a moment. Anger is something I think about in my own practice often. I have so much anger towards the world, towards the systems of oppression that weigh on me and my loved ones. That anger makes its way into my art practice and my writing, and I never know how to move past it, how to process it and turn it into something productive. El-Sayed’s works let me feel that anger for a bit, and reminds me that through that anger there is also hope and empowerment. Her work is about anger, but it’s also about empowerment within that and the ability to create space for each other. Sharing these emotions creates a space for us to feel connected, and it reminds me that I don’t need to find the answers alone. We are allowed to feel our grief and rage, and find tender moments through it together.
For more on Habiba El-Sayed’s work, see: http://www.habibael-sayed.com
Sanaa Humayun (she/her) is the child of Pakistani immigrants and currently lives and resides on Treaty 7 land. Her art involves a tender exploration of her childhood and familial relationships. She is passionate about fostering community through means of art, conversation, and an unapologetic love of gossip.
This article is published in issue 38.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue
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