Aisha

Aisha is Yemeni Egyptian American photographer and filmmaker Yumna Al-Arashis first artists book. This powerful, delicate publication, inspired by Al-Arashis great-grandmother, Aisha, is an homage to the lineage of women that she descends from; women of the multidimensional and many-layered landscapes of the MENA region. Searching for an understanding of the tattoos that graced her great-grandmothers body, Al-Arashi embraces the complexities of a symbolic matriarchal tradition. Unable to visit one of her places of origin, the war-stricken Yemen, Yumna traveled through Northern Africa meeting and photographing a diverse group of women belonging more or less to the same generation: all standing, sitting, looking, moving and laughing with assuredness and joy. By refusing the violence of selection and definition surrounding womens practices, Al-Arashi publishes every single photograph from her journey in this 392 page monograph, moving the work into an ethereal cinematic celebration. Al-Arashis images are gentle yet strong in composition, conscientiously connecting the woman to the land surrounding her and vice versa; they are incredibly rich in detail and color; and they are intimate, beautifully defiant and full of community and alliance. Aisha also includes Al-Arashis writing and poetry in which she reflects on memories of her great-grandmother and the scent of oudh that left a trail of magic wherever she floated in that home. In her genre-stretching texts, Al-Arashi also speaks on colonial archives, intergenerational storytelling and on the complexities of transnational female identity in patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist societies at-large.