For Hood River artist Amirra Malak, creating installations of liminal space offers a journey through time, light and identity. Malak is a multidisciplinary Egyptian-American artist living in the Columbia River Gorge, who inhabits spaces between cultures, countries and geographies.
OPB producer Brooke Herbert films Amirra Malak with her immersive video installation at The Ruins in Hood River, Ore.
Kate McMahon / OPB
“For me, liminal space is the space between,” Malak said. And, she adds, “it’s sacred.”
The term liminal space has been used in anthropology to describe the ambiguity of existence during cultural rites of passage — like a ritual marking the transition of a child becoming an adult. It can also describe the aesthetic of an abandoned place waiting to be repurposed. Malak says she feels most at home in liminal spaces, especially in the natural world, and uses light, pattern, movement, time, sound, and visual sensation to create healing experiences for people.
Her artistic media include drawing, painting, textiles, meditative video, spoken word, interactive and curated online spaces. Her immersive video installations explore bridging past, present, and future through the combination of ancient craft and modern technologies in video and textile installations inspired by Egyptian khayamiya tent appliqué — a craft that has been passed down through many generations of Egyptian tentmakers.
“I was blessed to be able to visit the Street of the Tentmakers in Cairo — one of the oldest, covered markets there,” Malak said.
A few years ago, she received an Oregon Arts Commission and Ford Foundation grant to be able to study with a master khayamiya artist named Mostafa Ellassy.
“He’s been sewing khayamiya for 45 years, and he’s part of a multi-generational family that sews khayamiya,” She said. Ellassy’s family is one of the last of seven families that hand sew khayamiya at the tentmaker’s street.
But, 7,000 miles away from Cairo, in the western outpost of Hood River, Oregon, Malak’s art is keeping a thread of that tradition alive. She mixes ancient khayamiya art with modern media to create liminal spaces for people to experience the transition between where they’ve been and where they’re going physically, emotionally, or metaphorically.
In her home studio, she draws khayamiya designs onto adhesive paper, cuts out the patterns and irons them onto translucent fabric panels. It’s an arduous, slow process that could be sped up with technology, but Malak believes the work of hand-crafting honors her heritage and her teachers.
To exhibit her work, Malak hangs the khayamiya panels in a corridor formation and projects video she captured of natural scenes — like shimmering light on water — onto and through the panels. Often, she will accompany the installation with an audio recording of her voice reading a poem she wrote. The result offers an immersive experience through liminal space that feels soothing and meditative.
Malak says experiencing her art can have a regulating effect on a person’s heart rate, even her own.
A forthcoming book by authors Sam Bowker and Seif El Rashidi with the working title, ”Art of the Egyptian Tentmakers” (American University in Cairo Press) will feature Amirra Malak’s take on the future of the khayamiya art form as both material and symbolic. Publication is expected later this year.
