Sana Art and Katara Art Centre are excited to announce Kholod Hawash's (b. 1977, Basra) first solo exhibition in the Arabian Gulf. Holding Dreams presents a survey into Hawash's practice featuring works from 2021 to 2025.
Hawash is a self-taught textile artist based in Helsinki, Finland. Her work draws inspiration from the cultural heritage of her native Iraq by portraying its landscapes, symbols, and local narratives. Hawash employs the Iraqi textile craft technique of jodaleia, or quilting. Traditionally, these quilts are made from recycled fabric scraps that are hand-stitched together and used as blankets and covers for furniture and walls. Her relationship with jodaleia traces back to her childhood in Iraq as she grew up watching her mother collect scraps of fabric during the years of economic sanctions on Iraq and transforming them into something both useful and beautiful.
The depictions of women as strong and dignified figures in various metaphorical and figurative situations and surrounded by symbols inspired by Sumerian and Babylonian mythology, where female deities represented wisdom and power, dominate Hawash’s oeuvre. While her practice presents a personal dimension and a node to her upbringing and cherished memories from Iraq as well as the stories of the women around her, Hawash also aims to send a political message of women’s liberation through her work. For her, the women’s suffering during wars and conflicts is reflected in the layering of fabric and the required patience for her craft. Every stitch is a mending of a wound, and every piece of fabric is an attempt to conceal a violated memory.
Hawash habitually revisits Iraqi folklore and myths in her work. Particularly since relocating to Finland, the utilisation of Sumerian and Babylonian heritage and symbols has become a way of reconnecting with her native Iraq. At the same time Hawash finds it important to highlight the country’s rich and beautiful history despite the modern day conflicts. On her tapestries the visual legacies of Iraq’s ancient civilisations play an integral role as Hawash draws from the Mesopotamian deity lamassu, the hybrid beast mušhuššu, and the Babylonian chief deity Marduk while presenting defiant female characters seeking freedom and emancipation.
There is a feminist message at the core of Hawah’s practice. Behind the aesthetically mesmerising, inviting, and meticulously created tapestries portraying women in an assertive light lies her wish for women around the world to achieve freedom and fundamental human rights as well as reclaim their dignity. For Hawash this political dimension as well as the wish to contribute to a critical contemporary art discourse in Finland and globally co-exist harmoniously.
Hawash has held solo exhibitions in Finland, Jordan, and Lebanon. She has also participated in several group exhibitions in Finland including the prestigious ARS22 at the Museum for Contemporary Art Kiasma as well as the textile exhibition Pehmo (Finnish word for ‘soft’) at the Helsinki Art Museum in 2022. Hawash received the William Thuring Prize in 2022 as well as professional grants from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) and the Kone Foundation. Her work resides in the public collections of Kiasma, the Helsinki Art Museum, and the Espoo Museum for Modern Art, as well as private collections in Dubai, France, Iraq, Switzerland, and Spain. In 2024, she represented Finland in the Nordic Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, in Lap-See Lam’s (b. 1990, Stockholm) working group, which made the multidisciplinary work the Altersea Opera.
