Evolving Connections & Connected/Disconnected
Collaborative work by Shereen Quttainah and Zahra SarvAazad
Collaborative work by Shereen Quttainah and Zahra SarvAazad
Evolving Connections and Connected/Disconnected began as a simple question:
what happens when two artists, two practices, and two ways of working meet — and are allowed to shape each other? These pieces are not finished statements but records of that ongoing effort: an attempt to let two practices speak to one another, to find where they align, where they resist, and where they change because of the encounter. Some of that meeting is visible in the work itself; some of it lives in the process behind it, in conversations, adjustments, and compromises that don't fully show on the surface.
Without setting out to, the pieces also carry our own backgrounds, geography, and heritage into the room with us. Evolving Connections is built from the ecoprinted leaves of the Chinar tree, a tree closely tied to Tehran, Iran, where Zahra is from. Connected/Disconnected is built from the ecoprinted leaves of the Olive tree, a tree that carries deep and shared meaning across the Levant, including Jordan, where Shereen is from. Neither symbol was chosen to make a statement about origin — but once present, they couldn't be separated from what the work means to us.
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Evolving Connections
This piece began with the Chinar leaves, but it grew to hold something more personal: the relationship between generations — of trees, and of people. There is a way older growth can hold and heal what comes after it; a way the essence of one generation threads through and into the next, weaving together even as it separates. Roots stay roots even after the branches grow apart. In this piece, we wanted to leave room for that idea — two generations as thread and leaf, distinct from each other, but still lending each other light; each one a window onto the other.
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Connected/Disconnected
Built from Olive leaves, this piece sits with a tension we didn't try to resolve:
how two practices, two people, two histories can be genuinely joined in one moment and genuinely apart in the next — and how both of those states can be true, sometimes in the same piece, without one canceling the other out.