How is magic embedded in our lives? How does it seep through the crevices of our most serious institutions? How is it interwoven with our lives religiously, socially, superstitiously, casually, culturally, mystically and mysteriously?
These are just a few of the questions that Zahra Marwan poses in her upcoming show, A Night Like Sea Waves. The show’s title is drawn from a piece by 6th century poet Imru al-Qais, translated by Fady Joudah: “A night like sea wave drapes me with all sorts of trouble / A night whose stars are tethered to solid stone with linen ropes.”
Born in Kuwait, Marwan is the author and illustrator of several children’s books including Where Butterflies Fill the Sky (Bloomsbury Publishing NYC, 2022). This story chronicles her family’s journey to Albuquerque, NM when she was a child, escaping discrimination in Kuwait where she and much of her family were considered stateless and were subject to open discrimination and discriminatory laws. Her art often explores her cultural roots in Kuwait, as well as her current life in New Mexico.
In this show, Marwan turns her eye to magic and mystery. “It’s a human drive to seek protection through allegorical thought and behavior, both of which are often imaginative and resourceful,” Marwan says. Her work evokes a playful kind of magic, focusing on and abstracting elements of magical history from her own family discourse and cultural remnants from the Persian and Arab Gulf.
One of these elements is fal, a fortune telling tradition in the Arab Gulf. One of Marwan’s aunts threaded eyebrows, pickled torshi, and predicted fortunes using fal in order to make a living and survive in the face of social and political disenfranchisement. Another element Marwan explores is the talismanic shirts that are found throughout the Muslim world, which often bore entire religious verses and are believed to be imbued with protective powers. Marwan’s work often has a deep textual relationship, which in this show examines how words carry weight, invoking spirits, magic and protection.
The show also speaks to the surreal realities of her family’s life as stateless people. “There are a lot of things in my life that when I say them out loud, I think ‘That can’t possibly be true,’” Marwan says: the fact that she does not have the right to live in her own country, that her aunt worked as a fortune teller in order to survive on the fringes of society, that her grandmother was shot in the leg during early century protests when she was young. Through this lens, unseen dimensions offer an opportunity to express the ineffable.
Her work in this show pays tribute to the unseen world, even as that world is threatened with extinction in the face of modernity and rationality. Her mesmerizing watercolors prompt viewers to consider whether life is better with the possibility of magic, even if there’s mischief in it. Marwan asks her audience to consider the role of magic in contrast to the data-driven, hard-edged rationality modern life encourages us to value above all else. What is the notion of the unseen dimension that many people feel without knowing, and can it connect us to a deeper, fuller existence?
For Marwan, the show is about optimism: “I hope these illustrations will function as fortunes, talismans, incantations of sorts, embedded with personal details of memory and day to day life.”
A Night Like Sea Waves will open at Hecho a Mano on Friday, July 4 and will be on view until July 28, 2025.