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The following visual essay recounts my experiences during a one-month residency at Singapore Art Museum (SAM). I prefer to call it a travelogue as it was truly a journey and closely ties into the project's theme of travel. This research-based curatorial project is part of my ongoing work titled “Your Name”. The project focuses on immigrant and refugee women worldwide, with its two main goals being: documenting the names, stories, and individual significance of women, to create a global network, and exploring how art can potentially improve their quality of life. This project originated in Iran, progressed to its second phase in Singapore, and is intended to gradually develop in other countries with immigrant/refugee women from across the world. This travelogue has a flexible format, tailored to the specific conditions of the destination country and the travelers (immigrants/refugees) residing there. The initial results were presented to the workshop participants during an open studio in Singapore. This text now records and further explores those findings.
Your Name
The primary focus of this project is on women who have been forced to leave their homes and loved ones, navigating life in a foreign country—legally or illegally, alone or with their families, single or married—often under challenging conditions. Although they play a vital role in the family, they endure profound social discrimination and are afforded far less support—be it from other family members, governments, or institutions meant to provide aid. Through my objective observations of everyday life in Iran and my collaboration with Khaneh Mehr –an NGO devoted to the education of working, migrant and refugee children–this matter became even more evident. I saw the neglect of the many issues concerning the mothers of these children in various aspects of life.I began voluntarily teaching art to immigrant and refugee women at Khaneh Mehr in 2020 by employing an open pedagogy approach that initially focused on Afghan refugee women in Iran. I aspired to discover a way to recognize, empower and increase their quality of life through my knowledge as an artist, curator and art teacher.
In the process of making their names, this project becomes an opportunity to reveal their many potentials and abilities that have been in the shadow of their daily activities or usual tasks. I refrain from teaching them new skills in the workshops; instead, I only provide a space for them to have the opportunity to work creatively.This workshop encompasses what they already know about handicrafts, combined with what they can create independently, learn from the internet, or from each other. What is significant is that this creative process takes rooted in their names, which symbolizes their identity, allowing them to physically hold and shape their own sense of self through creation. Counteracting the neglect of local handicrafts, using art to improve the lives of these women by fostering confidence, enhancing their social presence, supporting family income, and offering numerous other benefits can be the secondary advantage and interdisciplinary importance of this project.
Iran
In the "Your Name" project, I asked Afghan women to write their names in both Persian (their mother tongue) and English (a global language) on the same cloth, using any available material they liked at the Khane Mehr Art Workshop. I explained that in these pieces, they should create their names as best they could. This request had several contextual references to our workshops as most of the participants were illiterate. I wrote their names on small pieces of paper, and they traced the letters into the final frame, choosing the size and placement based on their preferences. Naturally, the Persian and English letters usually had deformations due to illiteracy and formal imitation despite being legible.
The next step was to make the pieces. The participants chose from the various tools in the workshop fitting their tastes and wishes and began working with techniques such as embroidery, beading, and crocheting. Since the women participating in the workshop often lacked formal training, they relied on traditional handicraft techniques passed down within their families. Afghanistan has a beautiful tradition where girls learn handicrafts from their mothers or grandmothers. Even those forced into marriage at a young age customarily learned these skills from their mothers-in-law. However, the wars of recent decades in Afghanistan, along with migrations and disruptions to daily life, have interrupted this form of traditional education, leaving many young women in the workshop without these skills.In such situations, I avoided direct training. Instead, I encouraged them to pursue ways to learn and simply guided them to effective methods. The first step in promoting a friendlier atmosphere was encouraging participants to learn from one another. The next step was to learn from the internet and introduce platforms that taught Afghan indigenous handicrafts for free.
But what is always emphasized in the workshops is creative thinking and inventing new approaches. How can each person create unique methods with the available tools and expose themselves to trial and error? How can you experiment without being bound to a predetermined outcome? How can you be fearless in artistic experiences? How do you put different materials together in one work? Or eliminate elements in the process of completing the work? Questions relative to the conditions of the works and participants are constantly raised during the workshop to increase the courage and mental engagement, and the power of adaptability as new ideas emerge in the works.
The process of creating, often with the participants’ children present and exchanging personal life stories, cultivated a unique atmosphere in the art workshop at Khaneh Mehr. The first move on my part was to create a sense of psychological security for the women who may be engaging in a formal educational environment for the first time. For them, communicating with me and other participants was the main goal during the sessions. Sharing the experiences and skills of sewing and embroidering, life stories, hobbies and dreams, advice on their partner and children, the story of immigration, the quality and way of life in Iran, and their problems and joys were among the topics that were discussed during the workshops. The following is a short story about the lives or dreams of Afghan women who participated in workshops in Iran. These narratives hold information that reflects how the women tended to introduce themselves.
Nafas gol: She does not have a birth certificate and speculates that she is about thirty years old. She has six children, the last two of whom are boys. She is illiterate, and for convenience, she suggested drawing the second part of her name, which is a flower, instead of writing it.
Golsum: She has a diploma and five children. She had a stroke at the age of twenty-five. Due to economic issues in Iran, she may have to return to Afghanistan soon with her family and she is worried about the fate of her three daughters under the Taliban regime.
Fazila: She has migrated between Iran and Afghanistan three times. Two years ago, at age twenty-five, she began learning literacy. She can read now but is still not comfortable with reading books. She is recently married and wants to become a painter.
Fazeleh: She has worked and lived between Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. She has worked since she was a teenager, doing different jobs. Now, she is weary and wants to be at peace in Iran while caring for her three children.
Khatereh: If she studies for another year, she will earn a diploma. However, with five children and the complications of being a refugee, leaves her little opportunity to continue. She must work as a tailor to cover the rent and support her eldest son's education, but she also needs to be at home with her children.
Fatemeh: She knows most of the traditional handicrafts of Afghanistan and performs them with utmost elegance. She embroiders all her daughter's clothes beautifully. If the art work had an income, she would not despair.
Sharifeh: She has five children now, but she committed suicide three times before having children. She says that art classes have given her a zest for life. She wants to be a writer. She has dreamed that one of her books has been adapted into a movie and became famous in Iran.
Yasman: She did not like to write her name. She thought it pointless. When she realized that she would not get paid for this work, she abandoned it halfway and left.
Mahjabin: She is a girl in a family of eleven who may return to Afghanistan at any moment. She is afraid that she will have to stay at home there and get bored of being unemployed and not seeing the streets. She wants to leave Iran and go to a place where she will be happy.
Jamileh: Jamileh means beautiful, so she tried to make her name beautiful. Like all Afghan women, she is married and has children and believed that this is not a special story to tell.
Singapore
The Singapore workshop was organized by Singapore Art Museum in collaboration with Migrant Writers of Singapore. The women participating in this workshop were migrant domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia. They used educational classes in different institutions on Sundays, which were their day off. I had carried all the equipment that was used in Iran by Afghan women from Iran to Singapore. I explained the subject of the workshop, soon the first problem arose. In Singapore, the alphabet of their native language was Latin like English. There could not be two different forms of the same name. But after a short conversation, I noticed an astonishing fact and immediately directed the workshop in a different direction.
Your Names
It is common in Singapore for different employers to give these women various names. In other words, each time they were hired by a new employer, they were given a new name to make it easier to pronounce. In fact, it can be said that a new character is constructed. One of the women had seven different names during her years of work in Singapore! I understood this as representing seven distinct identities. Although this issue was also rooted in their countries of birth, it was strange to me that the employer is not willing to try to pronounce the name of an immigrant woman correctly. On the other hand, I remembered that many Afghani names are pronounced with a different accent in Iran. Despite the fact that both countries speak Farsi, the criterion is not Afghan dialect (home country), but is Persian dialect in Iran (host country). As a result, I changed the project's title from "Your Name" to "Your Names" based on my local observations in Singapore.
This group were all working immigrant women who had various social activities. In addition to speaking English (their mother tongue), they searched the answers to their questions from the internet and various websites they knew, some of them had already learned skills from YouTube. But what connected them to Afghan women was the common experience of referring to their abilities. These women also did not have a chance to give significance to their individual skills and abilities among their many family and social responsibilities. I heard from several people that this was their first time participating in a creative workshop and their first piece of art that they did all by themselves During the workshop, I asked them several times to focus on freedom of action and experimentation rather than focusing on technical issues. This issue that ruining the work is out of the question and any result can be significant was new to them. In the second session of the workshop, they recounted their conversations with their children or their employers. I found that they have intelligently understood my intention from this exercise. And they have been completely exposed to it. Unlike Afghan women, they were not very willing to tell stories. Here, I present direct quotes.
Longakit Jarsel Golez: These six letters in my name come from the names of my two Grandmother, two grandfather, my mom and my dad. So, it is initials of my family.
Ellen Adenante Lavilla: She likes to write poems and simple short stories in her free time. She is also into watercolor painting focusing mainly on botanicals. She is a member of Migrant Writers of Singapore. Her written works were featured in a book Call and Response 2, a Singapore Migrant Anthology and a poem in an e-book Translating Migration- Multilingual Poems of Movements. Few of her most joyous moments were when she won Third Prize during the Migrant Worker Poetry Competition 2022 and as one of the live actors of Who Are You, a theatre play held at Esplanade Concourse.
Shy Lhen Esposo: Belen means "Betlehem" the iconic city where baby … was said to be born. Lhen is my nickname.
Nancy: These are my name and nickname that my parents gave me. I like my name that sounds the same as my mom.
Rochelle Baccay: She is from The Philippines and loves to explore the world, appreciates, acknowledges and believes everyone is a piece of art with a diverse life perspectives and unique gift and abilities to share and portray an intended purpose from a higher power in which rekindles our hearts and souls for the humanity and Believes that a good mental state is the parameter of the growth of a healthy social system.
Eli Nur Fadilah: My name means Light; it is from Quran. I choose green and brown because my parents are farmers. This work represents where I came from.
Sonia Serrenade: My name is Medina. People respect me they call me Fallo means I carry my father's name. The rest are all random names.
Lasam Irene Poblete: Irene means peace. My last employer called me Ice!
Ayu Candi Salzi: If you want to achieve your dream, you need to start small but you need to continue consistently towards what you want to be.
Nur Naim: When I was born, I got sick. My grandmother told my father to find a Rose. If the rose would grow, I would survive. If it dies. I would too.
Gina Buhanghang: I am 42 years old and from Philippines, working in Singapore for 17 years. I'm Interested in your art craft before you published in migrantwriters.sg. It is a big deal for me to learn, create an ideal craft. In the museum is awesome that all our hard work is presenting to others fellowmen, it's aims a potential to be part of the art crafts.
A network between Iran, Singapore, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines
The foundation of this project is networking and dialogue. This network is primarily and very tangibly between me, women and the countries that connect us as a third area and new built common area. Singapore is a third space for me, an Iranian, and immigrant women from the Philippines or Indonesia. Each of these two sides had a cultural exchange with their cultural past during the workshop with the tools of art influenced by this third region. Secondly, and from a wider standpoint, a network is built between women who have no knowledge of each other and are spread all over the world for political, economic and social reasons. They have always been considered as a whole with the general name of immigrant/refugee women in the world, and less attention is paid to their individuality. This network in the form of a work of art and an installation is spread and displayed alternately in different countries to bring the names of these women and a brief description of their personalities and lives through art and artistic spaces to the attention of others.
In addition, two types of paradoxical presence occur: The rhizomatic expansion of art becomes possible in non-artistic spaces, where individuals—who are not necessarily artists and often do not recognize their own abilities and talents—find opportunities created for them within this art project. These opportunities are sundered from traditional roles such as mother, babysitter, or caregiver, but rather acknowledge them as human beings, allowing them to express and showcase their abilities through the medium of their name within the project. the roles of mother, babysitter, or caregiver, but as human beings, allowing them to express and showcase their abilities through the medium of their name within an art project. Moreover, the art world embraces a broader and more diverse range of people, with artists, students, and art enthusiasts entering museums, galleries, and official art spaces, even if only once.
In the end, I must thank those who helped me complete this project and write this text. First and foremost, I am grateful to the women who participated in the workshops, as they not only made this project possible but also inspired and taught me greatly. I also want to extend my thanks to Mehr house NGO, Singapore Art Museum, Migrant Writers of Singapore, as well as a group of my friends in Iran and Singapore, for their immense support.
Asieh Afzal, Zhila Bashiri, Irfan Hošić, Zahra Irfani, Seline Ilana Teo, Yasmin Moshari, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Mobina Nazari, Angela Pinto, Joella Kiu, and Fatemeh Tavana.
A note from SAM: This essay was written by Akram, but we had to publish this on Samplings on her behalf. This is because Samplings runs on Notion, which is blocked in Iran, where Akram is based.
When we first conceptualised Samplings, we wanted all the writers — SAM curators and guests alike — to have equal access to the back-end of the platform. Unfortunately, this utopic ideal was not to be in this instance. Not wanting this to get in the way of publishing Akram’s text, we worked around this by working off a Google Doc instead.
If anything, this incident has really drawn the question of access quite sharply into focus for us. What does free access for all look like? How can we ensure that the tools we build remain open, usable and relevant across contexts? How can we do better when our attempts to build accessible systems fail? These are questions that remain unresolved for us, but that we hope to continue to actively pursue.
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