Please do not touch. Who hasn’t seen these words neatly typed onto a museum or gallery label?
Alongside this warning, Perspex glass, protective cases and rope cordons guard many a fragile sculpture or priceless painting, creating a physical barrier between object and interested audiences. However, in the case of artist Nilupa Yasmin, visitors are welcomed to touch, and even walk all over, her handcrafted work; although she asks that you take your shoes off, please.
Since 2015, Yasmin has made large-scale, brightly coloured woven mats, which are either exhibited as wall hangings, or more typically, and as she prefers, laid flat on the gallery floor. Enchanted by the beauty of Yasmin’s artworks, which appear as intricately patterned magic carpets, audiences accept the artist’s invitation to step onto them, barefoot. However, once engaged, visitors discern that these crafted items, beyond existing as decorative objects, are layered with personal meaning.
Yasmin belongs to a Bangladeshi family who settled in Birmingham, England, over the course of several decades: her grandfather immigrated during the 1960s, followed by her father in the 1970s and mother in 1995. Born and raised in Sparkbrook, a predominantly South Asian area of Birmingham, as a child Yasmin was surrounded by a very diverse community. The first in her family to enter into higher education, she started her undergraduate degree in Photography at Coventry University in 2014. Here, however, she discovered that she was ‘the only brown and visibly Muslim person’ on the course. Experiencing an ‘identity crisis’, and encouraged by her tutors, the artist began to explore notions of the cross-cultural self in her work.
Early on in her studies, Yasmin was drawn to photograph Foleshill Road, one of the most multicultural areas of Coventry, which is home to a majority of immigrant South Asian Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities. Much like Sparkbrook, colourful clothing and fabric stores, selling sarees, long salwar kameez suits and food from around the world, populate it. As Yasmin has recounted, she came across ‘a long stretch of shops and small businesses held together with years of hopes, dreams and hard work. These shops have become a source of livelihood, telling a story of the history and culture whilst becoming a home to its residents.’
Yasmin also learnt that Coventry has a rich history of ribbon-weaving. From the early 1700s to the 1860s, the silk industry employed half the working population of the city, and Coventry was the main centre of ribbon production in England. Having photographed Foleshill and its inhabitants, Yasmin wanted to exhibit these images in a way that paid homage to Coventry’s past and present, including its ribbon-weaving heritage. Seeking an appropriate way to display her photographs in dialogue with one another she came across the perfect solution – not in her studio, but back at home.
In Bengali culture, multigenerational households are common, and Yasmin’s maternal grandparents lived at home with her. On numerous occasions, she had seen her grandmother praying and, particularly during the summer, sleeping on a large handmade mat, called a shital pati. Originating from Bangladesh, this ancient craft item is woven together with strips of cane and, loosely translating as ‘cool mat’, is cold to the touch; it’s widely used by Bengali people as a mat for prayer or lying down on, particularly during the hotter months of the year.
Inspired by her grandmother’s shital pati, Yasmin cut her colour photographs of Foleshill into thin strips before weaving them together by hand into a huge mat. Yasmin had transformed individual images into an intricate and vivid installation, which she titled Baiyn বায়ন, the Bengali word for weaving. Although abstract on first glance, the mat’s complex patterns represent Coventry’s multicultural migrated communities both then and now, as well as the city’s historic ribbon-weaving industry.
Through the crafting of Baiyn, Yasmin was also reflecting on her own Bengali heritage, although she was yet to unearth, and could never have imagined, just how significant weaving would be to her. Yasmin recalls sitting at the kitchen table, plaiting together photographs, when her mum walked past and commented casually, ‘Oh, my grandma used to weave.’ Yasmin was taken aback and, questioning her mother further, found out that her great-grandmother had made a living from weaving bamboo strips into utilitarian objects which she sold back in Bangladesh; the young artist had a ‘professional weaver’ in her family history.
In many cultures, including those of South Asia, crafts such as weaving are typically passed from mother to daughter. Although her mother had missed out when she moved to Britain, Yasmin recognised that she had now ‘inherited the craft of weaving’. Still today, the artist is amazed that she is following in the footsteps of her ancestor: ‘I’ve always found it incredible that both me and my great-grandmother have made a living out of weaving in very different ways, so many years apart.’
Identifying her affinity with the textile culture of Bangladesh was a turning point for Yasmin. She realised just how ‘alienated’ she had become from her own heritage, as she has explained: ‘You’re trying to assimilate into British culture and bring your home culture with you. I’m too British for the Bangladeshi community, and too Bangladeshi to be British.’ She found herself questioning, ‘Where do I belong? What’s home? What’s my identity?’ Through weaving, Yasmin began to explore, reconnect with, and preserve her South Asian heritage: ‘I retraced the ideas of arts and crafts back to Bangladesh. It was a form of learning. This exploration also brought me and my mum, who had been assimilated into British culture, closer together.’
Yasmin also became interested in ‘the gender associations of craft’ throughout art history, which has shaped her practice and affinity with weaving. Alongside knitting, quilting, sewing, embroidery and needlework, weaving has historically been associated with the domestic sphere and subsequently considered ‘women’s work’. Within the hierarchy of aesthetics, feminine crafts have been marginalised and undervalued, in contrast to the ‘high art’ forms of painting and sculpture.
Women have, however, harnessed the power latent in craft forms to tell their own subversive stories. Today there is a word for this, and one which Yasmin identifies with: ‘craftivism’. Coined in 2003 by writer Betsy Greer, the term joins the separate spheres of craft and activism. ‘Voicing opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger,’ Greer has argued. Through her work, Yasmin deliberately flaunts the associations between weaving and feminine crafts: ‘What I make is art but because I identify as a woman, it is just seen as a domestic act.’ By weaving, Yasmin validates the traditional activities of women, including her great-grandmother; she connects with her own heritage; and she undoubtedly enables her own authentic voice to be heard louder, not just by others but by herself.
Early on in her career Yasmin also realised that – if she was to fully understand her place in the world – she would have to take a more personal approach in her art. In order to look deep inside, Yasmin would have to take herself as her own muse. In 2017, she did just this when she crafted Grow me a Waterlily, a richly coloured artwork, again woven together with photographs, which stretches to seven feet high. Its poignant title is incredibly personal: ‘My name Nilupa comes from Niloufa which means Waterlily. Hence the name, “Grow me a Waterlily”, was essentially a poetic way of saying growing myself.’
Exhibited in 2018 at Argentea gallery in Birmingham, Grow me a Waterlily was pinned loosely to the stark white wall and, draping down, it covered one corner of the smooth grey gallery floor. On this occasion, Yasmin also included a number of small woven stools and fabrics, grouped together and positioned upon the textured mat, as part of a wider tableau. In an accompanying caption, she invited visitors to enter into, and engage with, the installation, which had been fashioned in the image of her family’s contemporary British Bangladeshi home:
When you enter a Bengali house, you are welcomed into a living room. Shoes are lined up outside the room to keep the space clean. You will see a table in the room, a table filled with plates of food for every guest. This represents a sense of unity, a tradition and a similarity of home in every house you enter. A reminder of Bangladesh is always present in the room, whether it’s in the photographs, scriptures or woven stools. Muras are woven stools made from bamboo sticks, dotted around the room for when the sofas are too cramped. Bangladesh is always a part of the living room, even in England. Folded near the sofa you see a little row of kanthas. These colourful and embroidered blankets are made from old worn-down sarees and fabrics. Stitched together, each tells a story of time, memory and hope.
I ask you politely to take off your shoes when you step into my living room; I pray in here and I like to keep it clean. Sit on my Maa’s Mura and look around, maybe you’ll find a part of you too.
Evoking notions of home and the idea of belonging, Yasmin was warmly welcoming visitors to enter into this captivating reconstruction of her living room. However, having stepped upon the mat, guests who looked more closely at the woven-in-photographs found the artist looking back at them. Threaded into Grow me a Waterlily are forty-two colour photographs of Yasmin, which she shot under the bright lights of her studio, and pasted over digitally woven archival imagery of her family from personal photo albums.
In each of these woven photographs, Yasmin poses in a different outfit, from a floral printed teal saree passed down from her grandmother to her simple neutral prayer outfit. In the overlapping, interlocking images, the artist shows us that we are the sum of our parts – family, history and heritage are interlaced fragments which make up a fabricated whole: ‘Each image tells a story of some sort,’ Yasmin has reflected.
Yasmin also exhibits her self-portrait photographs, whole and unwoven, as untitled works in their own right. In one striking image she is dressed in her mother’s long-sleeved red-and-gold wedding Banarasi saree, with a matching veil and gold bridal jewellery, including bracelets. She points out that when she took this photograph she was ‘exactly the same age as when my mother had been married’ and the jewellery was bought for her when she was just two years old by her grandparents. ‘This specific image was a big play on society’s expectations of marriage for a woman’.
These posed portraits highlight that it is not just photography and weaving, but fashion, which acts as a form of self-expression for the artist. ‘I’ve always found fabric as something that has been immensely politicised, so me expressing my identity through those notions of fabric became important.’ If there’s one item of clothing that has been politicised more than any other, it’s the headscarf, which Yasmin highlights in a number of closely cropped self-portraits.
Often smiling at the camera and tilting her head to one side, Yasmin shows off her collection of distinct headscarves; from monotone black, green and red veils to a polka dot-patterned scarf, these fabric coverings always match her outfits, which range from traditional sarees to contemporary blouses. Wrapped in a turban, worn down or tied more decoratively, the headscarf – which Yasmin touches with her hands in several works – signifies her identity as a Muslim woman.
Many Muslim women turn to traditions of head covering as a means of observing hijab. As Yasmin explains, ‘The term means modesty, and in Islam both men and women are taught to uphold modesty in all aspects of their life, from the way in which they spend money to how they speak about success at work. Many women, therefore, choose to wear the headscarf as an embodiment of hijab. It allows you to conceal parts of yourself that you don’t want men – who are not part of your family – to see.’
Yasmin points out that in Western countries, such as Britain, wearing a headscarf is a choice for Muslim women like her. She perceives the act of veiling as ‘liberating’, since she can control ‘who sees what’, including her hair. However, she also recognises that the veil is ‘indicative of oppression’ in other cultures and countries, including Iran where women have been required by law to cover up using the chador, a full-body cloak, since the country’s Islamic Revolution of 1979.
During the 1990s Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, whom Yasmin cites as a ‘huge influence’, staged a series of black-and-white self-portraits, titled ‘Women of Allah’ (1993–97), in which she looks directly at the viewer from beneath a long black cloak. Emerging from this covering, her face, feet and hands are covered in calligraphic Farsi text by contemporary Iranian women poets, and she holds a gun. In a statement about the series, Neshat revealed, ‘These photographs became iconic portraits of wilfully armed Muslim women. Yet every image, every woman’s submissive gaze, suggests a far more complex and paradoxical reality behind the surface.’
Summarily, Yasmin confronts Westerners’ assumptions about Muslim women as icons of oppression, particularly in a world in which the veil is often perceived as a symbol of segregation and subjugation. Modelling her collection of varied headscarves, through which her appearance shifts significantly, Yasmin asserts the self-expression that this item of clothing can allow women like her. As she has described, ‘my headscarf is part of my identity’, which she presents as something shifting and composite. ‘It’s not necessarily religious but rather a part of my journey into understanding who I am. It means something different to different women.’
Neshat and Yasmin are among a growing number of Muslim artists, joining the likes of Lalla Essaydi, Farwa Moledina and Feriel Bendjama, who demand new ways of looking at women who wear the veil. They are not just subverting imagery from contemporary Western media, either. During the nineteenth century, European artists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jean-Léon Gérôme, painted fantasies of Muslim women lazing in harems, wearing sumptuous robes and lying in suggestive poses. Most famously, La Grande Odalisque (1814) by Ingres presents a reclining nude woman as an odalisque, or concubine; the artist has painted her wearing a colourful headscarf, appropriating this item of clothing to indicate that she is an exotic and erotic ‘other’ to be consumed.
In his seminal 1978 book, Orientalism, the art historian Edward Said critiques orientalist paintings such as this. Orientalism, he argues, is a tool to exoticise Islamic and Arabic people and construct them as the ‘other’ in order to justify colonial ambitions:
The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire. […] The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear the figures, whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.
As well as this traditional framing of the Muslim woman as an erotic ‘other’, within much Western contemporary art – and particularly photography – veiled females are frequently depicted as downtrodden. In 2019, Dutch artist Jouk Oosterhof was selected as a finalist in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize for her series ‘Invisible, In Focus: Child Brides in Bangladesh’ (2018). In colour portraits, scarves hide the faces of young girls, aged as young as thirteen, to protect their identities and render them invisible. While importantly pointing to the high percentage of child brides in Bangladesh, these photographs do also perpetuate a dominant victim narrative, within which Muslim women are always objects of oppression, curiosity and concern.
In contrast to this outsider’s gaze, Yasmin presents herself as a real Muslim woman, taking ownership of her own story from an inside perspective. While pointing to the symbolic significance of the veil in the unwoven artworks, Yasmin also interlaces imagery of the headscarf with that of other fabrics, fashions and her family in the woven mats. These layered patchwork pieces indicate that the veil is not alone in defining the artist’s identity, but belongs to a multifaceted whole.
Yasmin also points out that she, like many Muslims, is on a ‘journey with modesty which is ever changing’. This shift is reflected in the artist’s self-portraits – in many, she wears deliberately loose-fitting clothing, while in others she dons shorter dresses. She is also mindful of other muses’ altering attitudes towards, and expressions of, modesty. Yasmin’s mother, who features in photographs in her woven mats wearing a headscarf, has recently chosen to dress in a niqab, a veil which covers the face, leaving only the eyes exposed. ‘She would now have the right to ask me to remove images of her face from my past works, although she’s happy with their inclusion for the time being,’ Yasmin clarifies.
If, and when, her mother requires removal of her representation from artworks, Yasmin will acquiesce. Yasmin will also always ask for permission from her subjects to photograph them, include past images of them in museum exhibitions, or print photographs of them in books; and as her reputation rises, more muses ask that their images are held back from such wide public view. Diverging from artists, past and present, who have depicted Muslim women without consent and with disregard for their modesty, Yasmin respects her sitters’ personal wishes.
Given this notion of modesty among Muslim people, it is self-portraiture that allows Yasmin the greatest level of artistic autonomy; its liberating impact also has a deeply personal effect upon her. ‘I never intended to become my own muse,’ the artist has reflected, ‘but it gives you the freedom to play around with who you are.’ At the heart of Yasmin’s work is the desire to find, illuminate and depict her identity, on her own terms and for her own sake. Although her work is predominantly personal, Yasmin does generate public discourses around identity across religion and cultures: ‘I’m making a statement about myself; the subject I know best; although it was never my intention, my work is also relatable to other people. The work almost has a life in itself outside of who I am, because it does relate to others. It becomes more than just my story; it becomes the story of others too.’
Many female visitors have identified with Yasmin’s introspective work; moved by and connecting to representations of a veiled woman in a gallery, they have written to her, including one art student who emailed, ‘Looking at images of you on a wall, at someone who looks like me is hardly ever seen. I feel proud of your images. That people who look like us can actually be shown in art isn’t something we were ever taught in school.’
The personal stories we tell ourselves are the most powerful of all, which Yasmin has discovered. Through the acts of weaving and photographing herself, she is able to unite the threads of her narrative, past and present, and make sense of the ways in which hybrid cultures, place, faith and family intersect to structure the complex self. By expressing the rich tapestry of her life, as a British Bangladeshi Muslim woman, she offers alternative views of the veil, Islam and its intersections with contemporary femininity; she only asks that audiences leave their assumptions, like their shoes, at the door.