Doha

Miriam Ewers

During 2011-2012, I joined Virginia Commonwealth University’s Art and Design School in Qatar, a small country diplomatically and culturally important in bridging eastern and western cultures. There, my daily interactions with students naturally stimulated many questions of how a visual culture can lay the groundwork for better understanding between people of different nationalities. If asked to be mediators or interpreters or agents of culture in our globalized context, what would these young artists seek to convey? In turn, what narratives could I draw forth to contribute to a fuller understanding of those living and working in Qatar? I decided to pursue answers to my conundrum in conjunction with my students.

Audio recording 4: a student relates a story of empathy, describing a friendship with a family struggling to fund and maintain an educational environment for disabled students in their Indonesian community and their own daughter, who was born visually impaired. The student describes her friendship with the family and the blind girl’s extraordinary gift for memorization and melodic recitation of the Quran. The young woman’s learning of the Quran is doubly impressive because she relies solely on her auditory senses. The depth of feeling expressed through the young woman’s recitation of the Quran has often brought her audience to tears.

The story reveals that individuals with disability often bring unique gifts and opportunities to our lives and communities. I was impressed with the respect my student articulated regarding her friend. I believe this is a valuable story to share with people in a broader context.

The image I generated as a translation of this audio recording attempts to convey this story. Rather than have an abstraction of a melodic vocalization or a reference to the Quran as a text, I decided to use an image of tears, in reference to the tears of the audiences moved by the young woman’s recitation. I decided those tears would be cutout from a page, to increase the physical impact of a drawing. Thus, my work is reminiscent of Braille, the tactile writing system for the visually impaired.

This photograph was the only image taken outside of Qatar. Its location was on the grounds of the Fine Arts Building of Virginia Commonwealth University (Qatar’s sister school in the United States). The image is of trees, framed twice, once as a vignette to the document held up in the center and once again by the teardrop shaped cutouts. The cutout holes and the staging of the image for the photograph have a provisional quality. The tear shaped windows might frame any number of views and this document could be transported, held by any number of people, this provisionality speaks to a desire for the empathy of the story to be shared.

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