“Life Unraveled”

Solo Show

A.I.R. Gallery

2024, Sep. 07- Oct. 06, Brooklyn, New York

“Life Unravelled” is the condition of displacement. Increasingly, it could be said that we live in a world of the displaced, the world of people forced to leave behind their roots and past to escape war, hunger or persecution, either in hopes of a future or often even in mere hopelessness. 

The exhibition is a take on the suffering of the displaced, the severed roots and the life of anxiety and uncertainty, particularly the afflictions of women and minorities. 

Shabani uses unwoven strands of thread and fabric, as well as paintings and sculpture in her collection. The strands are all threads unfurled; threads that were once clothing—a process that serves as a metaphor for  a refugee’s bygone past and the shattered life she must now face. 

In a very fundamental sense, fabric represents attachment and cohesion like community, just as pattern embodies symbols and meaning, like belonging and identity. If the original clothes and patterns were an erstwhile integral reality, these threads are the unravelled present. Her life's fabric has come apart to leave these threads, or she herself must tear apart a life in order to remake a new whole. 

The artist employs layers of painting, strands of bold colors, shapes of fabric, all interwoven elements in chaos to represent  a deconstructed world to be reconstructed into a whole.