Back Home In Our New Home
by Saj Issa and Kiki Salem
April 17 – May 15, 2019
The Gallery at The Kranzberg
Back Home in our New Home is a visual exploration and reinterpretation of domesticity and its role in the immigrant experience as it pertains to the children of Palestinian immigrants in America. Visual artists Saj Issa and Kiki Salem have collaborated and created a space that both asks and answers the question of home as a place for reconnecting with the culture of our ancestors while resisting and succumbing to assimilation. The push and pull of East vs. West, the third culture experience, being raised in the in-between, all contribute to the feeling and longing of being back home in our new homes.
Saj Issa is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. She received a BFA in ceramics from Webster University and is currently an artist-in-residence at Craft Alliance Center of Art + Design. Growing up in the United States as a daughter of Palestinian immigrants, Saj is often situated between cultures looking from one side to another. Revisiting a homeland that faces an ongoing struggle for cultural and national identity prompts her to question the foundation of human civilization. Through an investigative approach, Saj uses ceramics and mixed media to re-interpret various forms in which barriers manifest. The objects Saj creates take various forms; some functional, others fluid and ambiguous. This ambiguity allows her to explore these forms in the free flow that becomes her artistic process. Creating forms out of clay allows Saj to further learn and respect the ancient medium. The required movements, the consistency, repetition, the evolution from malleable, to plastic-like, to solid rock, the scientific precision – all correspond to humans interaction and interdependence with the medium. Through surface treatment, Saj repeats similar marks to create visual order. These visuals can include words, certain symbols, patterns, and signs common to the public. Incorporating this imagery further communicates the notion of barriers, visible, tangible, and imaginary.
Kiki Salem is a Palestinian-American designer, academic, and entrepreneur, based in St. Louis. She was born in the occupied West Bank to a Brazilian mother and a Palestinian father and raised between there and the United States. She uses her work in printmaking, textile, and fiber art to answer the question, “Where am I from from?” whether weaving the intersections of her identity into a cloth, placing a print onto fluid and durable material or embroidering imagery and patterns that pinpoint and unpack her idea, experience or memory of home. More recently, she has taken the third culture experience and aspect of her work and turned it into a wearable, marketable art project called Punk Ass Arab that hones in on the Arab-American identity and affirms it as something livable, relatable and accessible to people who share that identity.
