Photo's narrate d story of Q8-ti traditions shaped by hand

Found an interesting article..... Photographs narrate the story of Kuwaiti traditions shaped by hand......@ Kuwait Times

Just wanted to share with the readers of my blog

Here's the link to Kuwait Times http://www.kuwaittimes.net/read_news.php?newsid=MTI2MDczNTkyMw==
Published Date: May 02, 2010
By Ahmad Saeid, Staff Writer

KUWAIT: What would we do without our hands? I am using them now to type this article, and you are using them to hold the newspaper. We use our hands to do most of the tasks in our daily lives, from handshakes and text-messaging all the way to the most delicate and complicated medical surgeries. We might even say that what we do with our hands determines who we truly are, and plays a great role in determining the paths of our lives. Ultimately, what a society does with the hands of its people works as a sor
t of identification for that society, giving it a distinct 'fingerprint' in the journey of human civilization.
A team of artists took to the task of using art to document the tasks done by hand in traditional Kuwaiti households; a life of details that are fading away. "I had the idea to document the simple day-to-day tasks that Kuwaitis used to do with their hands but are not doing anymore. We wanted to preserve this heritage and protect it from being lost or forgotten," said Yvonne Pepin-Wakefield, an assistant professor of arts in Kuwait University, head of the art team and creator of an art project.

The idea occurred to Wakefield after being involved in a project to portray the pomegranate in the arts and cultures of the Middle East. "I started to talk to all these different people in the Middle East and ask them what they did with pomegranates," she said. "Older people would tell me all these incredible stories about the use of pomegranates in cooking and curing and other things.
From that experience I realized that these stories were being lost, that this oral tradition was being lost and nobody was writing them down and then I thought about how to apply this to other areas," explained Wakefield. That's when the idea came to look into how people use their hands in the past on a daily basis to do things that they are not doing anymore. "I look at my students who are twenty-something, raised on computers, and never did these things. If they are not documented they will be lost forever," she noted.
The project consists of 30 pieces of artwork and recreates 19 activities in old Kuwaiti households. Activities such as washing, grooming, preparing food and playing were staged by creating replicas of the tools and instruments that were used as well as by restaging the surrounding environment for each specific task. Farah Khajah and Wakefield then took pictures of the various hand activities and projected them onto canvas in sepia tone. Wakefield then applied color to each of the pictures. Sarah Ali Al-Otaibi and other artists participated in the project.

I wanted to keep the feeling of the old hand-colored photographs," said Wakefield, who explained that getting the tone and uniformity of color wasn't an easy task. "The process is unforgiving. If you mess up, you can't erase. I had to experiment and throw out a couple of canvases," she added.

Wakefield who has been living in Kuwait for six years, said that being involved with this project changed her view on the history of Kuwait. "I realized that there is a rich heritage in this part of the world that I wasn't aware of," she asserted.

Sharing her view about the current artistic movement in Kuwait, Wakefield said that when she first arrived to Kuwait she wasn't aware of any art in the country. "I didn't even know if I could buy art supplies here. Since I've come here I found it fascinating that there are world-renowned artists in Kuwait and that there are some very unique things going on here. It's like a young plant that is growing and growing, with so much potential in the future," she said.

Wakefield has many projects in the pipeline. "I would like to continue these projects but also do a more modern version, using much more direct colors and be more experimental." The project started in July, 2009 and was supported by a Kuwait University grant. The collection of artworks will be displayed in an exhibition that will open on Monday, May 3 in Kuwait's Museum of Modern Art.