During 2011-2012, I joined Virginia Commonwealth University’s Art and Design School in Qatar, a small country diplomatically and culturally important in bridging Eastern and Western cultures. There, my daily interactions with students naturally stimulated many questions of how a visual exchange can lay the groundwork for better understanding between people of different nationalities. For example, if asked to be mediators or interpreters or agents of culture in our globalized context, what would these young artists seek to convey? What cultural differences do they experience and how are those navigated?  In turn, what narratives could I draw forth to contribute to a fuller understanding of those living and working in Qatar? I was particularly interested in how students would navigate a western style art education in an Arabic culture. I decided to pursue answers to my questions in conjunction with my students.

Our mutual cultural exploration began with an assignment; as their instructor of the first year of three-dimensional design, I began a project, “Prosthesis”, in which each student designs and sculpts a mechanical extension that expands the capacity of their physical body. For a reference, I had introduced Aimee Mullins –an American artist-collaborator, model, athlete, history and diplomacy degree-holder, and a double amputee. In preparation for their work, my students watched her TED Conference lecture entitled “The Opportunity of Adversity.”  Mullins described adversity as a consistent condition from which springs perhaps the greatest human capacities, adaptation and creativity. Inspired by this lecture, I asked my students to expand the prosthesis study by conducting their own audio interviews with a member of their families on the topic of “Adversity as Opportunity”. 

The assignment brought out the creative capacity of the individuals involved in a dramatic way. It also provided a nuanced portrait of the lives and culture of those living in the region.  I began to recognize that my responsibilities toward these students included bringing my growing understanding of their views to a larger audience, where the perspectives of Muslim women may be underrepresented. The audio recordings on this website are a selection of three of the students’ adversity interviews, used with their permission, and two more general interviews that I conducted. Together the conversations touch on themes of conflict, cultural exchange, bilingualism, educational opportunity, and the warmth of Arabic culture. The availability of student voices in addition to my own, resulted in a wider view than I could have achieved alone. What they would share about themselves to me was enhanced by what I could discover through the adversity recordings.

My project sought to probe an artistic problem: Image making as a form of understanding the narratives of the students. Being a visual artist, I set out to translate students’ narratives into a visual form. Negotiating the intersection of verbal and image based communication, I created five images, from the five audio recordings. A few strategies that played a part in my image making included the following self-imposed rules: First, I would avoid approaches that might be considered inappropriate for my collaborators; audio and video must remain anonymous and visual representations of the students themselves should be avoided so as not to be haram or "forbidden" in the predominately Muslim culture. Second, my process favored the photographed landscape as a means to build a sense of a particular place or theme, and I employed only partial human figuration, such as images of hands. This strategy was used and accepted by the students in their “Prosthesis” projects. Third, images I created are about the significance of the story rather than a specific storyteller. The images are a visual paraphrase of the student narratives rather than a literal translation or illustration. Fourth, with the photographs as the base image, I added vector drawings over the photographs to add a level of abstraction, a visualization of two and three-dimensional vector forms common to computer-aided design. The vectors also enhanced the complexity and mystery of the image, and are indebted to traditional Islamic geometric patterns, with their non-representational quality and themes. I hope that what the audience sees in the images is only part of a whole humanity that extends into infinity, a theme that I considered as I selected the photographs and enhanced them with the computer-aided graphics.