Overview

Customize

Mapping the Diaspora Art around your neck, shaped from Qatar’s map, a reflection on home, migration, and belonging.

As someone rooted in the field of art history, it was important for me to begin by honoring the origins of jewelry. From prehistoric adornments made of shells, feathers, and bones to the gold and gemstone pieces found in the tomb of Queen Puabi of Sumer, jewelry has always been more than decoration. It has served as a marker of identity, a symbol of status, and most poignantly a tool to cope with our longing for recognition and belonging.

This piece, part of the Customize exhibition, emerges from my sculptural series Mapping the World’s Diaspora. It is a collaboration with the talented Hamad, whose craftsmanship helped translate my bronze sculpture of the Qatar map into a wearable form, a sculptural necklace that I call art around your neck. Together, we created a piece that fuses the language of fine art with the aesthetics of jewelry, while honoring both its historical symbolism and contemporary relevance.

My art has long explored the complexities of diasporic identity, particularly how the notion of “home” is constructed, questioned, and continually redefined. I use architectural forms, especially houses, as metaphors to resist the fixed geographical assumptions often attached to identity. As someone who never lived in the country of my parents’ birth, I’ve grown up with a layered and sometimes fragmented understanding of home, one shaped by memory, movement, and imagination.

In this piece, the map of Qatar becomes a symbol of reconnection. It is the country that reunited my family and gave me a sense of closure with my Arab identity, a place where I felt both rooted and inspired. The map becomes more than a border; it becomes a container for story, memory, and possibility.

Mapping the Diaspora reflects on the emotional and geographical dimensions of identity. It invites viewers to consider how we carry our histories, sometimes quite literally, and how the form of a map, like a house, can hold both the intimacy of personal belonging and the complexity of shared displacement.

As with much of my work, this necklace is a small architecture, a structure of identity, history, and light.

“To me, jewelry has always been more than ornament. It is a memory in metal, belonging in form, art around your neck.”

Rim Albahrani 2022

Project Details

• Year: 2022
• Medium: Aluminum sculptures, Gold jewelry pendant
• Location: M7, Doha, Qatar
• Duration: March 2022