Malak Naseem

Malak Naseem is a Maldivian/Sri Lankan artist based in Scotland. Through film, printmaking and ‘hair-stitching’, she explores the familial and uncomfortable connections between migration, domesticity and politics, often using discarded materials, such as newspaper and packaging paper.

In dissecting Edward Said’s ideas of the ‘Orientalist gaze’, forgotten familial and colonial history turns to deconstruction and reconstruction, creating the fragility of already fading histories.

Ideas within post-minimalism, of embedding complicated personal history into minimalist grid-like forms, are present throughout in creating contradictions within the agency the non-western world faces in controlling its stories, both currently and historically.

Photo credit: Emma Verghese and artist

‘Aishath, Aminath, އާމިނަތު, އައިޝަތު’ is a series of works that explore forgotten familial and colonial history of my home country with discarded packaging paper and hair.

In three tapestry/patchwork pieces, delicate constructions of fragile narratives hang by strands of hair, filled with gaps and incomplete images, much like the holes in a family’s collective memory. An unrecognisable language to the western eye is used throughout, creating barriers and an inability to understand a protected familial history.

My collection of packaging paper is also my way of recording personal migration. Most of the paper is collected from the two times I visited my home since living in Scotland, wrapping some of my more fragile possessions in tissue and newspaper.

These transient materials lend themselves to the process of lithography, which has its history intertwined with the production of newspaper and other forms of factual publishing, creating contradictions within the agency the non-western world faces in controlling its stories, both currently and historically.

My material awareness stems from my personal research practice into the climate crisis and the Maldives, as we are inextricably linked to the conversations around rising sea levels and global warming. The understanding of ‘Wishful sinking’, a metaphor for how the Western world would rather see us as doomed victims of rising sea levels than prevent the effects of the climate crisis, deeply informs my focus on Maldivian political history and my family.

The sea from all the countries I have ever lived in, the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Scotland, is present throughout the work to highlight the element as a measure of distance from my home country and my family, but as the image is universal, it also functions as a connector of all these lands I have made a home.

My practice flows through implicit ideas of feminism and religion through my use of my own hair to stitch together my work for installations. Coming from a ‘100%’ Muslim nation and an increasingly religious culture that pushes me to cover my hair with a hijab, I find empowerment in the small hints of hair I collect from the sink drain being present structurally in my work, removing it from its domestic context with a sense of rootlessness.