Big Ideas: Care, Storytelling and Spacemaking with Sundus Abdul Hadi

Image: Sundus Abdul Hadi in collaboration with Ahmed Nasereldein, Family Portrait (2020), from The New Sumerians. Photography and Digital Composite.

Sundus Abdul Hadi is an Iraqi-Canadian artist, writer, curator, and founder of the artist-run bookshop, MAKTABA. She is the author of Take Care of Your Self: The Art and Cultures of Care and Liberation (Common Notions Press, 2020) and children’s book Shams (Tamer Institute; We are the Medium, 2020). Take Care of Your Self addresses care as a collective practice and political act rooted in the liberation struggles of the oppressed, focusing on the role of the artist in the context of war, colonial trauma, and displacement. Through magic realism, Shams tells the story of a little girl made of glass in an intergenerational story about trauma, healing, and transformation.

In this Big Ideas lecture, Abdul Hadi discusses the holistic nature of her practice, which moves fluidly from writing, spacemaking, visual arts, curation and book arts to engage in both individual and collective acts of care, storytelling and worldbuilding. Abdul Hadi’s talk will be centred on the concepts of care and trauma with a focus on the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa), in addition to presenting a multimedia storytelling of her book, Shams.

The Big Ideas in Art & Culture lecture series has been presented by over 25 Canadian and international artists over the past decade. The series features established artists whose practice pushes the edge of what it means to be an artist who engages with the myriad, multi-dimensional environments that compose our world.

The Big Ideas lecture series is co-presented by Musagetes, CAFKA, and the Art Gallery of Guelph.

Live transcription will be provided for this event