STONE AND SILK: DIANA AL-HADID

DIANA AL-HADID MAKES SCULPTURES FROM A FUTURE WHERE WOMEN ARE WHOLLY FREE. RACHEL WINTER, CURATOR OF HER FORTHCOMING EXHIBITION UNBECOMING, EXPANDS ON WHAT DREW HER TO THE ARTIST.

By Magnus Edensvard

Diana Al-Hadid once described her art practice as “learning how to make space through very simple means”—a way of carving out room, if you will, in a manner that is both intimate and gestural. This ethos is evident in her process: referencing billowing gowns and dresses to creating spatial, textile-clad pods, and constructing larger, natural forms like stalactite-lined caves and cathedral-esque structures.

Many of Diana’s installations suggest precarious shelters or monuments arrested in time. Drawn from personal memory and historical fragments, tactile planes are staged in such a way that you can imagine physically stepping inside them, or moving all the way through. For a sojourn, or perhaps for a brief moment of total internal reflection. These inhabitable spaces, evocative through their use of natural materials, create a state of play with a shifting sense of weight and scale—oscillating from the intimate to the immense, the inviting to the foreboding. Like watching a wave build up to the point of its inevitable break. In some ways, experiencing Diana’s work is a balancing act for the senses, as well as for the spectators’ personal library of memories and associations.

The artist was born in Aleppo, Syria, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio from the age of five by what she describes as a family of seamstresses. She trained in the US, obtaining a BFA in sculpture and a BA in art history from Kent State University, as well as an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. She now lives in New York, where she’s working toward a solo exhibition at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University this summer, curated by Rachel Winter.

Highly respected in global contemporary art and research, Rachel has focused her curatorial practice and publications on works by artists from Southwest Asia, North Africa, and their diasporas. Ahead of their forthcoming show, I had the privilege of discussing Diana’s practice with Rachel, tapping into her insightful academic perspective and deep research in relation to the world of unbecoming.

MAGNUS EDENSVARD: What first sparked your interest in Diana Al-Hadid’s work?

RACHEL WINTER: I’ve been working in this field for over 10 years now, and I’d read about Diana’s work in important publications like Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East and New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century. With this always in the back of my mind, the artwork that really changed my perspective on her practice was The Seventh Month (2015), which is in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art. I happened to see this work in 2023 when I was in the early stages of ideating unbecoming. Diana’s panel works are quite different from the sculptures I first learned about [and] there was something about this work in particular that was really striking. I’ve never really stopped thinking about that encounter, and it ultimately shifted the trajectory of the show.

ME: The exhibition title, unbecoming, is so poignant and multi-layered. Can you tell us more about how it came about and the many meanings it may hold?

RW: There’s an important tension between becoming and unbecoming. Diana’s practice is deeply rooted in process and materials, and everything she creates is the result of a very careful accumulation of lines, gestures, materials, and ideas. Her work really exemplifies this idea of “becoming” or taking shape. I also perceive her work as existing on a precipice. It’s so meticulously constructed and composed, yet it often feels frozen in time, hinging on a moment of transition or decay—of unbecoming.

This led me to think more about the idea of unbecoming, and ultimately, to the title of the show. Diana is drawing on various art historical, literary, and mythological references—not to copy them, but to examine them in their many contexts. I see her work examining and unraveling many of the values they represent, in this case around women, their behavior, and their attributes. For example, Diana’s depictions of Medusa exceed prevailing ideas about her as an ugly, angry woman with snakes for hair, which invites a conversation about how women’s anger is perceived in society.

Space is also an important part of this conversation. Diana is very focused on space: how you define it, occupy it, consider the viewer’s relationship to it. Her work quite literally takes up space—filling galleries with large-scale installations, prompting viewers to move around to activate it. But this line of thinking also extends to how women take up space metaphorically. Women are often told to be quiet and small, whether by physically getting out of the way, not sharing their opinions, or limiting their emotions or reactions. unbecoming is a celebration of this reimagining, where constructions of femininity and expectations for women are deconstructed, to posit an alternative future where women are free to be unbecoming.

ME: In some regards, Diana’s work can be read as a collage of women’s narratives, histories, experiences—brought together in an intricate layering using a range of different materials. These elements evoke a cultural landscape that the artist inhabits and seemingly weave together from the inside. Could you speak about this aspect of her work? How has her migration and artistic trajectory influenced her practice?

RW: Gender is a recurring theme in Diana’s work. She draws on these many historical, art historical, literary, and mythological references, but also on lived experiences. You can clearly follow Diana’s personal and artistic journey as you move through the show.

The earliest piece in the exhibition is Spun of the Limits of My Lonely Waltz (2006), which has not been exhibited in the US since 2006. This sculpture, which is an upside-down Gothic cathedral, was one of the first large-scale works she made after graduating from VCU, which takes us back to not only an early point in her career, where she was establishing herself as a sculptor working at this immense scale, but also an early moment when ideas about gender appeared in her practice. Other works like Lionless (2013) reflect Diana’s transition to working with these sculptured yet painterly panels and how Hans Memling’s Allegory of Chastity (1479-1480) became and continues to be a key touchstone.

Diana is also making several new works that will debut in the exhibition, all of which have connections to earlier pieces. In doing so, she intricately transitions between the specific and universal, between her Syrian heritage and growing up in the Midwest, while acknowledging the people who have been formative to her personal and professional development.

ME: One of the striking aspects of Diana’s work is her ability to seamlessly navigate between different forms—large-scale suspended sculptures, textile tapestries, drawings, paintings, and much more. How does she engage with form through a female lens, and in what ways does art history shape her artistic choices?

RW: This question brings me back to a conversation I had with Diana around the show’s title. In art and art history, there are so many expectations for women: what kinds of artists they should be, the subjects they address, the materials they should use, the form of their work. Diana was ruminating on how her work upsets all of that: Her materials do something unexpected because she pushes them and experiments. She makes things that exceed the scale she “should” work at. All of this is connected to her own investment in exploring materiality by pushing to extremes, which generates very innovative works, formally and technically.

In terms of subject, I think Diana is really questioning how the source materials she references hold ideals that resonate with our contemporary contexts. Rather than depict form or content through a female lens, I see Diana and her work interrogating the very idea of a female lens, and its many attendant expectations.

ME: One of those contexts that Diana’s work often evokes is the ruins of antiquity—fragmented yet charged with movement and mythic resonance. In Greek mythology, figures like Orpheus, Daphne, and Icarus exist in a state of transformation, decay, or transcendence, a concept that seems to permeate her work. How do you see Diana’s practice engaging with these narratives, particularly in the way they reflect on history, materiality, and the passage of time?

RW: There are two ways of thinking about this. For one, I interpret the cumulative nature of Diana’s work as speaking to history as a fabrication. It’s something we put together from distinct perspectives and contexts, retold in fragments over time—something which allows it to be continually reconstructed. On the other hand, by returning to these different historical references, not as a copy but as a conversation, Diana invites us to contemplate the relevance and ramifications of the source material as something which remains in our sociocultural imagination today, whether we realize it or not. Like history and myth, ideas about what is unbecoming are also fabricated, accumulated, and persistent, for better or worse. But if we know that, we can think about how time changes our perspectives, or perhaps doesn’t, and unravel what is considered unbecoming.