Since 2021, mosaic artists around the world have been working together to draw attention to the plight of Afghan women under Taliban rule. Initiated by the Tunisian mosaic artist Bady Essid Jaballah, the community project sees artists contribute small glass mosaic squares, which are joined to make a scarf. Over 1,200 artists from 46 countries have contributed their work.
In Australia, too, the mosaic community mobilised. “Australians and New Zealanders made a third of the world’s contributions,” Kristin Wohlers, who coordinated the local group, shares. The community ethos was strong, with donations making up much of the materials used.
Throughout 2022 each participating state held exhibitions showcasing their work. It was also the International Year of Glass, and a time when Wohlers connected with Aimee Frodsham, the artistic director of Canberra Glassworks. The resulting partnership exhibition brings all of the Australian mosaic contributions together for the first time—in a show curated by Wohlers and Behishta Anwar—to show the breadth of national support for the cause. “Working with different cultures is deeply embedded in the glass making process,” Frodsham says. In this spirit, the exhibition will also include workshops to allow visitors to learn these skills.
The mosaic designs are inspired by traditional Afghan patterns from 14 ethnic groups; Wohlers worked with community consultants to ensure cultural sensitivity. When connected—a process which Wohlers and others undertook over many hours, experimenting with configurations—the pieces make a kaleidoscope of colour and style. “Every one of those 420 pieces is different,” Wohlers says.
Three years on, mosaic artists continue to support Afghan women through art. As Frodsham says, “It’s really been such an exciting, amazing thing that they have pulled together as a community.”
Hanging by a Thread: Mosaics for Afghan Women
Canberra Glassworks
On now—22 October
This article was originally published in the September/October 2024 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
Suggested Reading
65,000 Years brings truth telling to art history
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
Jane O'Sullivan
Oslo Davis reimagines art terms
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
Oslo Davis
The major exhibitions open in each capital city this summer
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
Art Guide Australia
Falling Better with Patrick Pound
For Patrick Pound, whose new installation The Museum of Falling is on show now at the City Gallery, the arrangement of objects and images has long blurred the line between fact and fiction, jolting our perception in surprising and unusual ways.
Peter Hill
The ecstatic visions of Isaac Julien
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
Michael Sun
Jonathan Jones on Country and kinship
bagan bariwariganyan: echoes of country, curated by Jonathan Jones and now showing at Bundanon, highlights a long history of Indigenous art on the New South Wales south coast, with works and installations from Jones, Aunty Julie Freeman, Aunty Cheryl Davison, and Mickey of Ulladulla.