Cover Art Concept

This, Alma Sinai says of her work Witness, chosen for this issue's cover, "is the first painting I did as an undergraduate student in 2010, while I was studying fine arts at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design]. A lot has changed since then, but also many things have stayed the same."

I corresponded with Sinai in the last days of September 2022, during the early days of the mass protests that shook Iran in the fall—revolts that, most likely, will be remembered as a feminist revolution. These are, suddenly and again, moving and thrilling times for everyone who cares about women's and human rights, times filled with hope, admiration, and fear. That is certainly so for an artist like Sinai, who was born and raised in Iran and studied at Tehran University of Art and then moved to the United States in 2010, and these feelings echoed in our email exchange. "The initial drawings of this painting were made around the time of the green movement in 2009, and now that I'm revisiting it, another big movement is happening with women at its center. I wouldn't directly link all of these together, but I do think that in some way it corresponds to the overall climate of this momentum."

Sinai thinks of herself as an interdisciplinary artist using printmaking, drawings, videos, and installations as her primary media: "The ideas in my works stem from an interpersonal realm, but they speak out to different individuals and communities that undergo abrupt and suspended situations in various scenarios." The notions of repetition, entanglement, and being trapped in a certain situation while finding ways to deal with, resolve, and transform it are leitmotifs in her work. In Witness we see a series of entangled headless and limbless female figures building a unified entity, which generates new coping, grappling, and determining mechanisms. Women are always at the center of Sinai's work, because she feels that she has a better understanding of women than of men, and a more intimate relation to their psychology.

Everything in Sinai's artistic practice seems to allude to the diasporic condition: an ambivalence between absence and presence, visibility and invisibility, that is often represented through the binary of outdoor and indoor. The alternation between drawings and prints also alludes to the fact of being in flux, an idea that is already part of Witness and that Sinai is further developing in new projects: "An open space between the drawings and the ideas allows for a back-and-forth conversation that creates the core of my discourse. The three sections in my most recent project are in dialogue through repetition, loops, patterns, and ultimately the notion of trap."

Through the process of recurrence in the motif of the nets and the looped narratives with no exit points, meanings get lost, added, and distorted. The nets and their encompassing void together and solely implicate a space in which the figures are confined and trapped. Within different parts of this project there lie an ongoing tension and an occasional leakage between inside and outside, while a sense of suspension and pause is implied.

These in-between zones speak to our contemporary moment, with its net of uncertainties, fears, and hope.