Yumna Al-Arashi: Aisha

A stirring love letter to the artist’s great-grandmother, Aisha, and a visual and poetic homage to an elderly generation of women across the Middle East and Northern Africa-- the very matriarchies Al-Arashi descends from

This is the first artist’s book of Yemeni-Egyptian American photographer and filmmaker Yumna Al-Arashi (born 1988). Inspired by Al-Arashi’s great-grandmother, Aisha, the book is a homage to the lineage of women from the many-layered landscapes of the MENA region. Searching for an understanding of the tattoos that graced her great-grandmother’s body, Al-Arashi embraces the complexities of a symbolic matriarchal tradition. Unable to visit one of her places of origin, the war-stricken Yemen, Al-Arashi traveled through Northern Africa, where she met and photographed a diverse group of women belonging more or less to the same generation. By refusing the violence of selection and definition surrounding women’s practices, Al-Arashi publishes every single photograph from her journey in this 392 page monograph, moving the work into an ethereal cinematic celebration.
Aisha includes Al-Arashi’s prose and poetry in which she reflects on memories of her great-grandmother. In her genre-stretching texts, Al-Arashi also speaks on colonial archives, intergenerational storytelling and the complexities of transnational female Arab identity in patriarchal, capitalist and imperialist societies.