Reciting Women: Alia Bensliman & Khalilah Sabree
I first encountered the work of Alia Bensliman in fall 2022 in an exhibition at Artworks, a dynamic hub for the visual arts in downtown Trenton, New Jersey. Captivated by her intricately patterned portraits, I went on to see her work at the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie Mansion and the Hutchins Galleries at the Lawrenceville School. I viewed more of her images of Amazigh women, which celebrate the visual traditions and cultural perseverance of the Indigenous people of North Africa.
My first meeting with Khalilah Sabree occurred soon after in Sabree's studio at Artworks, a space as rich with painting materials as with finished works, neatly wrapped and organized by series. As we stood before the paintings she had set out, Sabree described her series Destruction of a Culture, in which a single photograph that she took during her pilgrimage to Mecca in 2004 is reproduced, transferred, and reworked across several panels to become a meditation on the physical and spiritual destruction that results from global conflict.
In some ways, Bensliman's and Sabree's lives and artistic practices are worlds apart: Sabree is a devout African American Muslim born in Macon, Georgia, who has spent her childhood and motherhood living in Trenton; Bensliman, a secular Muslim, was born in Tunis, Tunisia, and immigrated to the United States twelve years ago. Sabree received a master of fine arts degree in painting from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and works with a variety of materials‚—acrylic, oil stick, and graphite‚—often engaging with her subject matter through its materiality. Bensliman studied fine art and product design at the École d'Art et de Décoration in Tunis; she uses fine-tipped Micron pens and homemade watercolors to evoke the decorative motifs of Islamic and Amazigh textiles, architecture, and script, familiar to her from her family and life in Tunisia.
Yet these contrasts also reveal points of convergence, among them a shared spirit that led‚—after a series of wonderful joint conversations‚—to this exhibition. Both Sabree and Bensliman draw as much on Islamic architectural motifs as on personal and spiritual experiences to question boundaries between ornament and figure, painting and photograph, and traditional and modern imagery. Both artists rely on visual repetition to articulate the challenge and wonder of negotiating multiple intersecting identities. Their work platforms questions of Indigenous identification and activism, global concerns about Islamophobia, and widespread gender inequity. Human rights struggles and individual journeys meld, in works by both artists, into prayers for empathy and human connection. Seen together in Reciting Women, their paintings take on a contemplative form of storytelling, or recitation, that draws on memories and histories to peer into the future with resilience and hope.
I invite you to hear from the artists themselves.
