Aisha Khalid

I just found this contemporary Pakistani artist, Aisha Khalid. In this piece, she has created a massive shawl by pushing gold-plated pins through four layers of fabric.

Aisha Khalid, Kashmiri Shawl, 2011, pashmina scarf and gold-plated steel pins. Source: Huffington Post, 2/26/12

Khalid explains this work in an interview with Guy Mannes-Abbott at the Sharjah Art Museum in the United Arab Emirates. Here are some excerpts:

"This piece is about what's happening in Kashmir because whenever I travel to the West I was always take for my friends, Kashmiri scarf or shawl, something like that. If I ask someone, what shall I bring for you, they always say Kashmiri shawl or something....So, it's all over the world but people don't think about where this beauty and this luxury is coming from, and how the people are suffering. No-one is thinking about that and it's a very bad situation in Kashmir--Indian Occupied Kashmir....So I was just thinking that one side of this shawl is black with gold, you see and you feel like it's a beautiful embroidered fabric...you see the other side is red and with the sharp edges of pins."

She worked on this piece with a team for 16 hours every day for forty days. All 360,000 pins were gold plated by hand (which requires tying each nail). They are not secured to the fabric other than by the pressure of them being pushed through the scarf.


For the entire interview:
http://notesfromafruitstore.net/2011/04/21/notes-from-a-biennial-appendix-ii-in-conversation-with-aisha-khalid/#more-5715