Textural Threads: Hania Zazoua

I absolutley love the presentation of these digitally collaged images, printed up onto silk and stretched on embroidery hoops by female Algerian artist Hania Zazoua. It was Zazoua's collage on the flyer that drew me to this group exhibition in which female Arab artists explore indentity and culture, where I was excitied to find parallels with my own work in both the themes and the reference to hand sticthing, symbolising for me the stitching together one's identity.

The exhibition notes describe Zazoua's practice as drawing "inspiration from her wanderings, real or imagined" and "flirting with a trivial dream world" into which she manipulates popular or historical cultural icons to "explore an alternative reality of the society she lives in", using paradoxes to look at the"complex relationship between East and West" - such as in these images above and below from her piece Young Ladies of Icosium" in which she intends the Algerian women to present both an "interface and interference" between East and West.