Using Thread To Weave Messages
By Anna Seaman
An artwork that attempts to capture the size of walls is the centrepiece of an exhibition titled Finer: A Thread…in the Swell of Wandering Words at Sharjah’s Maraya Art Centre from March to July. Cristiana de Marchi, an Italian-Lebanese artist and writer based in Dubai and Beirut, spent six months knitting a seven-metre-by-1.3-metre artwork, filming the process in five locations across the UAE, culminating in Sharjah as the show opens. Its enormous length and uniformity address the show’s prevalent theme, a questioning of geographical borders, national identities and man-made confinements. Monument to the Falling Wall is an attempt, in the artist’s words, to “capture the size of walls”—physical walls that separate countries from one another, but alluding too to the mental walls in our minds.
Curated by Maraya Art Centre’s Cima Azzam, this exhibition focuses on de Marchi’s stitching practice, which she is well known for. She often uses embroidery to comment on the way communities in this region are united but, at the same time, delicately so. The fine balance between doing and undoing (for which threads serve as a perfect metaphor) is something the artist has investigated previously and it comes to the fore in this show. A multichannel looped film titled Doing & Undoing (The Nation) features de Marchi stitching the five Arabic letters that make up the words Al Watan, which translate as The Nation, in white thread on a fuchsia background and then painstakingly picking out all the stitches one by one. Other standout pieces include Untitled (White Flags), which depicts a series of regional flags with their markings and patterns intact but discernible only by the direction of her white-thread stitches.
Her work uses delicacy and subtlety to serve powerful and serious messages. Stitching and embroidery, so often associated with women and at the same time often undermined, are purposely chosen to deliver her concepts. The quiet of the medium forces the viewer to slow down and ponder. Even the title itself has this effect. Inspired by the poem ‘Speak, You Also’ (1955) by Romanian-born German-language poet and translator Paul Celan, Finer: A Thread…in the Swell of Wandering Words is a romantic, mysterious and poetic phrase that somehow succinctly captures her practice.
This is the first institutional presentation of de Marchi’s work and will be accompanied by a rich public programme, video documentation and illustrated catalogue with an essay by Jill Magi, associate arts professor at New York University Abu Dhabi.