This program has been postponed until Spring 2022. As we work on developing a new iteration of the workshop, you are still able to claim a spot for the upcoming event! Please email contact-programs@henryart.org with any questions.
Prior to registering, please note that this workshop is for Indigenous peoples to participate.
On the occasion of Diana Al-Hadid: Archive of Longings, the Henry presents a series of writing workshops with three Pacific Northwest writers who will lead sessions that continue the processes of influence suggested in Al-Hadid’s work, as well as give community participants opportunity to consider "archives" that live close to home and heart. Fed by multiple literary, artistic, and other cultural sources, Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptures meditate on the conflicts and ruptures exposed when these stories are brought together. The intention of this workshop series is to add to the archive of longings that Al-Hadid’s work represents.
In the final workshop of this series, join us outside of open gallery hours for the opportunity to access the museum in a private setting to talk through and feel the tension of being within a colonial institution known to archive sacred items and control stories. This workshop is intended to give Indigenous participants the opportunity to write in conversation with Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptural work and fabian romero’s poetry scholarship practice. Archive of Longings speaks to the tension between the art canon and the Syrian, Muslim woman’s body as well as histories and mythologies unique to Syrian, Muslim, and immigrant experiences. Building off of this context, the workshop invites Indigenous participants to write about embodied experience and histories carried, and to think of storytelling as self-making. Themes that may be explored include the coloniality of gender and sexuality, the tensions between wanting to record experiences as Indigneous people and wanting to protect sacred stories, and the violence of that tension within hidden histories.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
fabian romero (Purepécha) is an Indigequeer poet, filmmaker, artist and P.h.D. student in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. fabian’s academic and artistic interests integrate settler colonialism, Performance Studies, racial capitalism with storytelling and poetry. Their work centers Purépecha people from Michoacán, Mexico to Seattle, Washington and beyond.