Sarah Hakani | Brooklyn, NY
the war that ripened
Mixed media, 38” x 55” (2020)
Collaging images that were generated by running the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish through a broken neural network, this contemporary Islamic miniature literally and figuratively reinterprets Darwish’s line, “Do not regret the war that ripened you, just as August ripens pomegranates on the slopes of stolen mountains.” It expresses the artist’s feeling that “we are fighting a much more collective war than we have experienced in our lifetimes, one that I hope is ripening us.”
Does this artwork speak to you?
Sarah Hakani
Sarah Zarina Hakani is a South-Asian, Shi’a Ismaili Muslim from Atlanta, whose work focuses on the de- and re-construction of identity in the context of reclaiming the self as independent of but directly informed by the systems and structures that possess it. She has a background in Neuroscience, which she applies to better rooting and understanding her ever-evolving esotericism. Sarah works through her relationships with the divine and her own divinity through ethnographic, literary, and artistic research, coupled with multidisciplinary creation. Her works are the physical manifestations of her journeys through faith, womanhood, caregiving, and resilience. Through exploring internal juxtapositions and constructing oneness from duality, Sarah’s work highlights and makes sense of her lived realities and contrasts as a multihyphenate Muslim woman.
During her Masters in Education, Technology and Innovation from Harvard, Sarah explored how creation can serve as a tool for learning and innovation, particularly for marginalized folks to rewrite their interactions with the world. Currently, she works as an learning designer at General Assembly, an artist-in-residence at The People’s Forum in New York, and co-founder and editor of Reconstructed Magazine, a space that uplifts queer, Black, and Shi’a Muslims, navigating their own ever-evolving faith practices through creation.