Preview: Thursday 26 Sept 6:30 - 8:30PM
Exhibition: 27 Sept - 27 Oct 2019
Open Hours: Wed-Sun 12 - 6PM

Out Of Service presents a new commission by London-based Lebanese artist Aya Haidar. Haidar produces embroidery work on found textiles relating to home, diaspora, memory and imagination, collaboration around shared concerns is a key part of her practice.

New work has been developed over a 9-month period through conversations, workshops and time spent with campaign groups, community organisers and cultural workers all working with a focus on domestic and immaterial labour.

Installed at Cubitt are a series of embroidered works all made in Haidar’s home, sewn onto dusters, muslin cloths and bin liners. Working with textiles in this way, as ‘home productions’, produces discrete pieces that work to counter the nostalgic notion of the ‘domestic.’ Instead, Out of Service positions the domestic as a political site and its proximity for Haidar to artistic work, to affect, repetition, care work, paid/unpaid, cleaning, parenting, the working body.

The leaks, spills, stains, invisible work, workers, bodies and their movements, the anecdotes of Haidar and others, have been recorded, stitched and presented. These serve as a partial-portrait of domestic space as work place, office, studio, nursery; where one lives, works, socialises, leaves.

Out of Service continues Cubitt’s Structures That Cooperate programme, a 15 month series of exhibitions, events, workshops and research departing from Cubitt’s position as an artist run cooperative and how this can shape and support collective concerns as cultural workers.

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Aya Haidar is a London based Lebanese artist whose practice develops artworks through conversations around shared interests and concerns relating to home, diaspora, memory and imagination – often using embroidering, craft and collage. Past works have focussed on the recycling of found and disposable objects making works that explore loss, migration and memory, with a personal connection to the history of a region [the Middle East] explored through the histories contained within personal objects/belongings. Recent solo exhibitions include: Wish You Were Here Athr gallery, Jeddah (2017) and Behind Closed Doors New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2011). Recent group exhibitions include: New Art Exchange Open, Nottingham (2019), Refusing to be still (2018), The Clocks Were Striking Thirteen (2018) LTAYM, Athr Gallery (2017), I Spy with My Little Eye, Mosaic Rooms, London (2015)