Aya Haidar
Circular Series, 2025
A collection of items of clothing, from a child’s jumper, to a man’s vest to a woman’s jumper to a single sock, hangs like a trace of a family portrait. These items bear the traces of wear through the holes across the knit, and have subsequently been carefully darned re-using my late grandmother’s pulled wool from her hand knitted jumpers. I grew up by my grandmother’s side, as she knitted all her cardigans and jumpers. When she outgrew the jumper or simply wanted a change, she would undo the knit by pulling its wool and reknit a new one using the same wool. This lost generation understood the value of materials and labour, which stands as a very stark contrast to today’s disposability.
When she passed away, I inherited all her cardigans and jumpers and have pulled their wool to mend and repair our clothes by darning. This act of mending and repair, through the reuse of decades old spools of wool, lovingly passed through my grandmother’s fingers and now through my own, as I work on clothes that belong to my own family, not only speaks of the handing down of such valuable skillsets, but also of the tangible connection passed down through the matrilineal lineage, coming round full circle, from generation to generation.
The Long Walk, 2017
Interview: Haibat Turk & Hana Haidar, Camera and Edit: Stuart Cameron, 16 min.
My grandmother and mother recount their stories, in tandem, during the 1982 occupation of Israel in Lebanon. My mother was trapped in Beirut, whilst my grandmother was at home in the suburbs under siege. The version of events of how they reunited, under harrowing circumstances, are recounted from one to the other, as they unfolded in real time together.
It is an insight into the plight of the human condition in war time, the desperation to reunite with loved ones and the power that is held in preserving these histories between three generations of women.