Aisha Tidachan Abbassi – TASAWAR TRANSCULTURAL TALKS

Aisha Tidachan Abbassi is an artist, designer, and aspiring writer based between Houston and Tunis.

Since leaving the design industry to return to the arts, Aisha has worked as a project coordinator, artist-in-residence, workshop facilitator, and counselor in Tunis, collaboratively employing alternative forms of education and creative intervention to engage local youth and children.

Her artistic practice has sculptural and social emphases and employs mainly sérigraphie (silkscreen printing), geometric shapes, and language. Her work lies at the intersection of art, design, and civic action and is grounded in the themes of heritage and diaspora, art as social practice, and the making and breaking of patterns.

In her artistic and curatorial work, Aisha explores the creative potential of togetherness when contemporary and community arts converge. Her experience as a TASAWAR Curatorial Fellow further solidified her interest in artists and initiatives whose aesthetic practice is a tool for community-building in search of justice. Rather than attempting to define art, she seeks to discover its many uses and abilities in today’s context—where does it begin and end? What does art do? What can art and curation offer in the further development of individual awareness, collective identity, and a more equitable future?

PHOTO
Photo courtesy of Kevin Villalobos | Houston.tx.usa | 2019
Aisha A Abbassi dressed in a traditional Cambodian costume called the “sampot.”
Costume courtesy of Leng Chou Abbassi.