Abid’s ‘Searching for Home’ reveals the plight of refugee women and children
Exhibition review of Humaira Abid’s Searching for Home (Bellevue Arts Museum) by Susan Kunimatsu for the International Examiner.
The purpose of art is to communicate: to share the beauty of an object or place, to convey a feeling, to rally around a cause, to remember a person, to tell a story. Artists create because they have something to say. Humaira Abid has made it her business to speak for those who are not being heard…
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“I use a lot of symbols in my work,” Abid says. In “The World is NOT Perfect,” shoes, clothes, and cell phones stand in for the people that wore them, now scattered in a pile of bricks in the aftermath of some unnamed tragedy. In “The Stains Are Forever,” babies’ pacifiers, some stained red, represent the children killed in a mass shooting at a school in Peshawar, Pakistan in 2014. But a sweeper seems to be pushing them into the past. Then there are the lines of ants that meander across several of the installations.