In her new exhibition at an arts centre in Scotland, Sukaina Kubba inserts herself into the lineage of rug weavers, transforming age-old floral and geometric design into fragile, rubbery latex matrices.
The Baghdad-born artist grew up in Abu Dhabi, studied in Montreal and now lives in Toronto. In between she was a lecturer and curator at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland from 2013 to 2018 and has exhibited her work in Canada and the UK.
Her latest work, on display at Dundee Contemporary Arts, comes from a residency in the institute's print studio, where she delved into Scotland’s history of rug making.
As industrialisation grew in the 1800s, a number of factories in Scotland turned to manufacturing rugs for a newly developing middle-class market as well as ocean liners, hotels, and new building projects across the country.
Their ability to machine-produce the carpets displaced the cottage industries of rug production in Iran, India and what is now Kurdish and federal Iraq. Yet many of the carpets still used Persian rugs as the basis of their design.
Factories such as Stoddard & Co and James Templeton & Co would send people down to the V & Museum in London, for instance, where they would trace Persian rugs in the museum collection. These watercolour tracings were then brought back to Scotland, where they were mass-produced and sold at cheaper cost.
Kubba’s research culminated in Turn Me Into a Flower, which she opened last week at Dundee Contemporary Arts, a non-profit centre in the Scottish city of Dundee. Kubba had been working with Tiffany Boyle, who recently took up the post as head of exhibitions in Dundee and put together Kubba’s exhibition as curator.
Echoing the process of transference, Kubba has retraced the designs from what is now the Stoddard Templeton collection, as well as rugs from her family and other types that she has become interested in. She has produced them in soft latex via 3D printing.
Unlike the way that these rugs have been produced for thousands of years, Kubba has taken out the human maker. Instead, she has brought computers into the mix, though even here she works to allow the technology to have a degree of control over the process. After uploading the design, she speeds up the 3D printing process so that the printer must try to withstand the new speed, creating glitches and random effects in the final product.
The results are eerie weaves that she hangs on the wall. They carry the un-naturalism of computer-generated work, as if an early iteration of the Matrix from the popular film had tried to produce woven carpets. There's also a sense of fragility, with gaps in the soft filament showing through the bare bones designs.
“I’m interested in the process of the transformation of the image and the object,” says Kubba. “When they started making the rugs in Scotland, there was a sense of both transportation and transformation of these carpets. Now I'm taking these drawings and traces and transforming them again.”
Rugs as history
Kubba has been experimenting with the rug designs for a number of years, though this is the first direct research into the commercial workings of Victorian Scotland. Her fascination stems in part from the history of rugs as elements of migration – a craft form that began in the Middle East and subsequently travelled, as did her family, from East to West. The itinerancy, she notes, is embedded into the form of the rug itself, which is designed to be rolled up and easily transported.
But she also looks at rugs as storytellers. A few years ago Kubba grew obsessed, she says, by one particular type of Persian rug, called senneh, which are typically hand knotted and designed as they are produced, rather than worked from a template. Because of this organic method of production, their intricate floral designs often slip from the grid or contain mistakes.
“Sometimes I imagine that there are two or three women who made them,” she says, “And there’s bits of them that are quirky. It’s very hard to explain, but through remaking them I feel I understand the maker who created – say – the zig-zaggy squiggles that form the edges of the diamonds or the borders of the work. It’s an aesthetic choice, but it’s also the way someone's hand works.”
For Kubba, the senneh designs reveal the stories of their making – much like her 3D printing technique introduces its own idiosyncrasy into the process.
The carpets also have their own hidden relation to industrialisation. Much like Victorian Scotland’s wealth derived from new means of production, Kubba also explores new techniques in manufacturing – taking the elements of 3D printing and working through what an artist might do with them.
She tried for a long time to create a drawing, she says, that one could pull off a wall – until a fellow artist told her about 3D pens, or pens that “write” in latex filament. It was by experimenting with these new materials that she realised what she was creating was new woven wall pieces – which only then led her to investigate the rugs that she had grown up with, in Abu Dhabi and Toronto. (One of the works not in the show is based on her brother’s carpet, which she remembers playing marbles on.)
But now she says, the works have returned despite themselves to the look and feel of textiles. “Even though the material is plasticky, they have an embroidered and woven feeling to them,” she says. “Some of them look like velvet – like they’ve started as a watercolour and a text and then been transformed back to something tactile and soft.”
Sukaina Kubba’s Turn Me Into a Flower runs at Dundee Contemporary Arts until August 4.
Top investing tips for UAE residents in 2021
Build an emergency fund: Make sure you have enough cash to cover six months of expenses as a buffer against unexpected problems before you begin investing, advises Steve Cronin, the founder of DeadSimpleSaving.com.
Think long-term: When you invest, you need to have a long-term mindset, so don’t worry about momentary ups and downs in the stock market.
Invest worldwide: Diversify your investments globally, ideally by way of a global stock index fund.
Is your money tied up: Avoid anything where you cannot get your money back in full within a month at any time without any penalty.
Skip past the promises: “If an investment product is offering more than 10 per cent return per year, it is either extremely risky or a scam,” Mr Cronin says.
Choose plans with low fees: Make sure that any funds you buy do not charge more than 1 per cent in fees, Mr Cronin says. “If you invest by yourself, you can easily stay below this figure.” Managed funds and commissionable investments often come with higher fees.
Be sceptical about recommendations: If someone suggests an investment to you, ask if they stand to gain, advises Mr Cronin. “If they are receiving commission, they are unlikely to recommend an investment that’s best for you.”
Get financially independent: Mr Cronin advises UAE residents to pursue financial independence. Start with a Google search and improve your knowledge via expat investing websites or Facebook groups such as SimplyFI.
Tax authority targets shisha levy evasion
The Federal Tax Authority will track shisha imports with electronic markers to protect customers and ensure levies have been paid.
Khalid Ali Al Bustani, director of the tax authority, on Sunday said the move is to "prevent tax evasion and support the authority’s tax collection efforts".
The scheme’s first phase, which came into effect on 1st January, 2019, covers all types of imported and domestically produced and distributed cigarettes. As of May 1, importing any type of cigarettes without the digital marks will be prohibited.
He said the latest phase will see imported and locally produced shisha tobacco tracked by the final quarter of this year.
"The FTA also maintains ongoing communication with concerned companies, to help them adapt their systems to meet our requirements and coordinate between all parties involved," he said.
As with cigarettes, shisha was hit with a 100 per cent tax in October 2017, though manufacturers and cafes absorbed some of the costs to prevent prices doubling.
What can victims do?
Always use only regulated platforms
Stop all transactions and communication on suspicion
Save all evidence (screenshots, chat logs, transaction IDs)
Report to local authorities
Warn others to prevent further harm
Courtesy: Crystal Intelligence
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The years Ramadan fell in May
What can you do?
Document everything immediately; including dates, times, locations and witnesses
Seek professional advice from a legal expert
You can report an incident to HR or an immediate supervisor
You can use the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation’s dedicated hotline
In criminal cases, you can contact the police for additional support
Red flags
- Promises of high, fixed or 'guaranteed' returns.
- Unregulated structured products or complex investments often used to bypass traditional safeguards.
- Lack of clear information, vague language, no access to audited financials.
- Overseas companies targeting investors in other jurisdictions - this can make legal recovery difficult.
- Hard-selling tactics - creating urgency, offering 'exclusive' deals.
Courtesy: Carol Glynn, founder of Conscious Finance Coaching
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
The Energy Research Centre
Founded 50 years ago as a nuclear research institute, scientists at the centre believed nuclear would be the “solution for everything”.
Although they still do, they discovered in 1955 that the Netherlands had a lot of natural gas. “We still had the idea that, by 2000, it would all be nuclear,” said Harm Jeeninga, director of business and programme development at the centre.
"In the 1990s, we found out about global warming so we focused on energy savings and tackling the greenhouse gas effect.”
The energy centre’s research focuses on biomass, energy efficiency, the environment, wind and solar, as well as energy engineering and socio-economic research.
Anxiety and work stress major factors
Anxiety, work stress and social isolation are all factors in the recogised rise in mental health problems.
A study UAE Ministry of Health researchers published in the summer also cited struggles with weight and illnesses as major contributors.
Its authors analysed a dozen separate UAE studies between 2007 and 2017. Prevalence was often higher in university students, women and in people on low incomes.
One showed 28 per cent of female students at a Dubai university reported symptoms linked to depression. Another in Al Ain found 22.2 per cent of students had depressive symptoms - five times the global average.
It said the country has made strides to address mental health problems but said: “Our review highlights the overall prevalence of depressive symptoms and depression, which may long have been overlooked."
Prof Samir Al Adawi, of the department of behavioural medicine at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, who was not involved in the study but is a recognised expert in the Gulf, said how mental health is discussed varies significantly between cultures and nationalities.
“The problem we have in the Gulf is the cross-cultural differences and how people articulate emotional distress," said Prof Al Adawi.
“Someone will say that I have physical complaints rather than emotional complaints. This is the major problem with any discussion around depression."
Daniel Bardsley
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