Residencies — AYA HAIDAR

PEER Gallery, London

May - September 2023

Over five months, I led a series of collaborative and creative hands-on workshops responding to Peer’s exhibition programme and the interests of Hackney Circle members.

Taking inspiration from Peer’s exhibition We Are A Group Of People Composed Of Who We Are, which explores artistic, cultural and social collective work that took place in Hackney between 1971 and 1986, I worked with Hackney Circle members over the course of five months to produce a series of fabric banners that platform the voices and views of Hackney’s older residents.

Participants will explore various archive materials from campaigns and groups active during this period including, Hackney Pensioners Press, Centerprise, Hackney Peoples Press, Hackney Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Hackney Gutter Press, Homeless in Hackney, East London Anti-Fascist and Anti-Racist News and Hackney Unemployed Media Scheme, to unpack how civic space can become a site for storytelling and activism through the creation of your own hand stitched and patched banners.

Three Rivers, Bexley

August 2021 - May 2022

Making Ties is a social engagement project reliant on the participation of Bexley’s varied and diverse community members who have taken part in a nine-month creative practice project.

Through conversation and interaction we explore notions of community, trace back relational histories through memory and storytelling, as well as serve in a skills exchange through the labour of our craft.

Each participant is deeply rooted within the community, with some never having left it, and trace back not only their personal histories to the place but also explore reasons for not having left. What keeps us here? What binds us to this place and its community?

Each participant has contributed a hand stitched sampler, which collectively will be patched together into an inter-generational community story quilt, presenting intimate stories and personal reflections from an ever changing face, landscape and community of Bexley.

Cubitt, London

January - October 2019

Over a nine-month period I worked alongside resident curator Louise Shelley to develop conversations and workshops with campaign groups, community organisers and cultural workers, all working with a focus on domestic and immaterial labour.

My time spent in exchange with local activists Freedom for Domestic Workers culminated in a solo show titled Out Of Service, showcasing newly embroidered work on found textiles relating to home, diaspora, memory and exploitation.

Out of Service continues Cubitt’s Structures That Cooperate programme, a 15 month series of exhibitions, events, workshops and research departing from Cubitt’s position as an artist run cooperative and how this can shape and support collective concerns as cultural workers.

Deveron Projects, Scotland

October 2017 - February 2018

As part of a 4 month residency, I was invited as creative practitioner alongside anthropologist Marc Higgin to develop a social integration program for 120 Syrian refugees newly settled within a local Scot community, across rural Aberdeenshire.

We decided to bring these two extremely disparate communities round the table together by literally bringing them round a table.

We set up No.11 Café, a donations based hub for local, vulnerable and isolated community members to come together, transcending language and borders in a bid to share stories, customs and culture through food and communality.

Film by Mohammad Homouda (2018)