Cover Art Concept

Hala Al Khalifa's She Wore Her Scars like Wings, 13 shows us the joint of a wing with feathers falling to the side, almost like rain, putting out a fire shown raging inside. The image is also a heart, an open wound in the chest, blood red, darkened with shadows of interiority, an organ or organs with their rawness displayed to the world. As in Surat al-Inshirah (or al-Sharh) in the Qurʾan, Al Khalifa shows us the heart opened to relieve human suffering and make hardship not only bearable but easy. Here the heart with its throbbing pain is soothed in the hands of angels, taking flight, or wing, despite—or because of—its suffering. Ibn ʿArabi (1966: 119–25) wrote of the heart as a place where opposites meet, but also as the seat of creativity and imagination (see also Morris 2005: 37–76).

In her commentary on another work, Fate (2018), a piece shown at the Bin Matar House Art Space in Bahrain, Al Khalifa laments the "pain and suffering" of refugee boats trying to reach the shore, of helpless bodies blown by angry winds, of lives lost. She writes, "I have no power to take away their pain and suffering," saying that her only power is through her creative work composed as a tribute (Al Khalifa 2018). Al Khalifa's image harnesses the power of empathy to alleviate suffering. She Wore Her Scars like Wings, 13 appears like the interior of a woman in a biologically essentialist way. What could be more essential to the human, or perhaps even to being a woman, than the heart?

Al Khalifa is the culture and arts director of the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities and formerly served as the head of education at Qatar's Museum of Islamic Art. She exhibited the She Wore Her Scars like Wings series at the Athr Gallery in Jeddah in 2017, as part of a sequence of exhibits featuring women artists from the Gulf. Al Khalifa's series is about "intimacy and vulnerability, but also strength and perseverance" (Al Khalifa 2017).