Audio recording one: a Qatari student interviews her older sister who was wrongly accused of plagiarism while studying at an American university. The conversation centers on how the young woman overcame this experience.

To make an image-translation of the audio interview, I photographed the sun, veiled by clouds, over Doha. The photograph was digitally enhanced and darkened to resemble the Doha sky seen as if through dark sunglasses. I then superimposed a vector drawing, hovering in the sky, of many circles gridded evenly taking the form of an elongated cube. The three-dimensional grid gave me an ordered finite form that offered a poetic parallel for an institutional framework of a university where individuals are organized into a conventional system reminiscent of our Qatari student caught in a system of recriminations.

Seen on edge, the three-dimensional field of circles produces a secondary effect or what is called a moiré pattern. In this instance, the visual results are clearings in the field, a network of radiating paths that depend on an individual’s relative position to the three dimensional object. In this case, I have adapted the moiré, to reference the subjective position of a single individual and the complexity, overlaps, conflicts and paths that may emerge from that individual’s vantage point while navigating a liberal arts education.

The image was conceived as a field without limit, a sky of infinite space, metaphorically similar to the youthful attitude of anything is possible. Counter to this myth, of limitlessness is a finite counter-form, full of collision and secondary paths. The narrative and image demonstrate a sense that negotiating conflict is required for us to understand our power, creativity and individuality.

Audio recording two: a student, originally from India, has an intimate conversation with her mother about the topic of adversity. Their conversation weaves warmth and humor with the struggles of settling in a new country and reflections on the bonds between family and friends.  In this recording, adversity is characterized as an everyday occurrence and as something that teaches compassion, strength, and release from the inconsequential entities of life. The theme of letting go struck me as a reflective concept mirrored in several religious disciplines, usually discussed as the principal of non-attachment in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Non-attachment has echoes in many other religions such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

My response to this student’s interview is a photograph of a cavern found in the Qatari desert and a figure staring into it. This photo was chosen as visual placeholder for the reflective sensitivity of the human mind that attends non-attachment. The vector overlay distorts the clarity of the photographic image except for two places where the grid is erased to give an unimpeded view of the figure and the opening to the cave. Visiting this cave brought to mind the vastness of geologic time and, in comparison, the smallness of human lifetime.

Audio recording 3: a student discusses cultural adaptation. On academic scholarship from Pakistan, a student speaks with her Qatari/Egyptian friend about the differences between Qatar and Pakistan. Both girls speak with enthusiasm about participating in a wedding in Pakistan for a dear friend and sister. Among other things, they describe the similarities and differences in food and the way food is consumed. The student from Pakistan describes her personal adaptation to Qatar and what overlaps and gaps exist between the two cultures. She identifies the strategies she has observed or developed to bridge differences in languages, cultures, and academic disciplines.

I was most struck by the student’s variety of observations regarding how to survive in a new cultural context, and this adaptation is what I attempted to translate into my image. At one point, she described how gesture becomes the sole medium for communication. I asked this student if I could photograph her hands. Using her gesture to indicate a direction, became my way to translate the young woman’s coping strategies and her observational facility.

I then overlaid a series of lines across the image, which becomes a maze from which the eye seeks escape. The few gaps or interruptions to the direction and uniformity of the lines are my response to her form and gesture. The parting of the lines responds to the directional or grasping potential of the fingers. Where the lines overlap her arm, they become a decorative pattern like a henna or mehndi worn by women at weddings and other celebrations in Pakistan.

Audio recording 4: a student relates a story of empathy, describing a friendship with a family struggling to fund and maintain an educational environment for disabled students in their Indonesian community and their own daughter, who was born visually impaired. The student describes her friendship with the family and the blind girl’s extraordinary gift for memorization and melodic recitation of the Quran. The young woman’s learning of the Quran is doubly impressive because she relies solely on her auditory senses. The depth of feeling expressed through the young woman’s recitation of the Quran has often brought her audience to tears.

The story reveals that individuals with disability often bring unique gifts and opportunities to our lives and communities. I was impressed with the respect my student articulated regarding her friend. I believe this is a valuable story to share with people in a broader context.

The image I generated as a translation of this audio recording attempts to convey this story. Rather than have an abstraction of a melodic vocalization or a reference to the Quran as a text, I decided to use an image of tears, in reference to the tears of the audiences moved by the young woman’s recitation. I decided those tears would be cutout from a page, to increase the physical impact of a drawing. Thus, my work is reminiscent of Braille, the tactile writing system for the visually impaired.

This photograph was the only image taken outside of Qatar. Its location was on the grounds of the Fine Arts Building of Virginia Commonwealth University (Qatar’s sister school in the United States). The image is of trees, framed twice, once as a vignette to the document held up in the center and once again by the teardrop shaped cutouts. The cutout holes and the staging of the image for the photograph have a provisional quality. The tear shaped windows might frame any number of views and this document could be transported, held by any number of people, this provisionality speaks to a desire for the empathy of the story to be shared.

Audio recording five: the last recording touches upon Qatar’s extraordinary diversity and the country’s flourishing educational opportunities. Among the students, who are Euro-Arabic, North African and Arabic, themes emerge about the educational opportunities of Qatar. National identity, cultural complexity, and humor are displayed in the stories of how these students landed in and traveled out from Qatar.

It is said that in Qatar poets, scholars and travelers would gather under the shade of the Sidra tree to exchange knowledge and opinions. This is why the Sidra tree is the image and the symbol of the Qatar foundation, which implemented the Education City where I conducted this research.

Coincidentally, paralleling the Sidra tree metaphor, I employed a tree, albeit an acacia tree from Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar’s Art and Design school courtyard, as a metaphor for an educational context. In the accompanying photograph, representing the audio interviews that I conducted with my students. I added a computer-aided design, a grid of globes, a kind of virtual fruit situated below the canopy of the tree, as a symbol of new worlds made possible by the context and imagined by the students. The tree and the digital overlay combine traditional and contemporary aesthetic sensibilities evident in my students’ last audio recording: a connection with traditional Arabic culture in all its complexity and a future oriented and global perspective that envelops those living and working in Qatar’s Education City.

Reflecting on the fifth audio recording, above all, I wished to create an image that would convey a spirit of the young women I worked with in Qatar’s Art and Design school; a spirit of empowerment where young women united by common interests in art and design are supported by a unique and dynamic educational setting.