The Brooklyn Rail

Diana Al-Hadid creates freestanding sculptures, wall-based relief paintings, and works on paper to examine the narrative frameworks that inform human culture. Born in Syria, Al-Hadid immigrated to the United States as a child and grew up in Ohio. On the occasion of her exhibition, unbecoming, at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, Al-Hadid joined Elizabeth Buhe on the New Social Environment (Episode #1240). Their conversation, edited for print, touches on a range of topics, including the relationship of the body to architecture, what it means to be unbecoming, and why images of women in motion are so important to the artist.

Elizabeth Buhe (Rail): Your exhibition is a retrospective of twenty works over the last twenty years shown across two galleries. Spun of the Limits of my Lonely Waltz is both the oldest work in the show, from 2006, and one that is close to your heart. When we spoke previously, you said the show felt like it was a self-portrait, or you were thinking about this show through the lens of self-portraiture, especially as you saw it being installed. Can you talk about that feeling?

Diana Al-Hadid: Probably every show is a sort of a self-portrait in some ways, but this one feels more so because there are actual representations of my image and representations of my body. And it really starts with this piece. It’s called Spun of the Limits of my Lonely Waltz, and I made it almost twenty years ago. It was pretty incredible to see it come back, because it hasn’t been in the States in nineteen-some years since I first made it. Back then it was in a small summer group show in LA.

I don’t often feel a lot of feelings around my work, but this was a rare moment where I felt kind of emotional seeing the work again, maybe because in some ways it’s the oldest surviving sculpture, and it just feels very intimate to me. Let me explain the process of making it. I put paint on the soles of my feet and I danced the waltz in my studio. It was actually at a residency in upstate New York. And wherever my feet left footprints on the ground, those footprints became the blueprint for the spires of the cathedral.

Rail: So it began with a dance?

Al-Hadid: Yeah. It’s a building made not for a body, but of my body. It was made to the proportions of my specific movement. It was made right side up, and then I kind of cartwheeled it, so it stands on its spires, and the feet are at my eye level. I danced both the male and the female positions. The female is the nave and the male is the buttress. I’ve come to see this work as holding a lot of root themes that kept coming up in my work. Self-portraiture might not seem obvious to anyone who knows my work, but my work is very handmade. It’s made with really small marks that accumulate. And this piece in particular holds the core tenets of my practice, which are, you know, movement and motion and fluidity.

And for me, that concept, it’s like a way of being, it’s almost a moral imperative. There’s so much literature on movement as a kind of political agency, because movement is about bodily autonomy. It’s about freedom. It’s essentially a form of resistance, against hierarchy, against rigidity, against things that are static. And you can expand a lot from there.

Later I became interested in embodied cognition when I learned about George Lakoff and metaphor and how we understand the world through very basic metaphorical concepts that can be traced through our movement. It can be understood by how our body lives and exists in space. And we can find it in our language too, right? This piece is essentially the opposite of the phrase, “stand your ground,” which is about strength and stability. It’s obviously a cathedral, but it’s upside down and it’s not based on the cross plan. It’s based on a squarish plan. I learned that some gothic cathedrals, including this one specific cathedral in Spain, were based on a squarish mosque. I was raised a Muslim, so that was really interesting to me.

Rail: I’d love to come back to that idea of motion, but can you talk through the process of making this work? I’m curious how you get from the footprints on the floor to a three-dimensional version. Are these actual casts of your feet?

Al-Hadid: Yes, they are. In a lot of cultures and religions it’s kind of impolite to make a show of the soles of your feet. They’re often considered dirty. You’re supposed to remove your shoes when you go into a mosque. Like any spiritual space, it is supposed to be very clean. So the idea that the piece begins with soles of my feet, that’s actually very transgressive.

Spun of the Limits of my Lonely Waltz was an intuitive work. I made it with very crude and simple materials, a lot of which are the same materials I use today. They’re basically common construction materials that you could find at a big box store: wood, polystyrene, plaster, fiberglass. When I set the spires down on the footprints, it established the organizing principle of the piece. It’s made from foam and wood. I carved all the details by hand. The only things that were cast were the feet. And then I actually burned it, which was kind of risky, but it was controlled. I was kind of careful. It was fun to do, but it was chaotic. That’s how I made it.

In a way, you can really see the materials. I mean, they’re processed and transformed, but it was one of the first works where the surface was much less precious than in earlier works. This one unlocked that sort of surface treatment. Before I was sanding and polishing a lot, if you can believe, and I’m still pretty fussy with all of these details.

I’m not a terribly religious person, but a lot of superstitions still exist in me, like that the ground is a sacred space for me as a sculptor. To be in battle or in conflict with the ground has always been one of my basic or fundamental aims. “Battleground” is a funny term, but it’s appropriate insofar as I’m trying to get the sculpture to not just rest politely or comfortably on the ground.

So that was one of the things that I really wanted to try to do: uproot this structure. Cathedrals are these super vast things that are supposed to reach the heavens. They’re supposed to reach god. They’re towers, and they’re supposed to make you feel small. They’re supposed to make you feel this disproportionate sense of scale and vertigo. When I did my kind of customary European backpacking tour after college, I visited every cathedral in every city I visited, and I had that experience of feeling extremely overwhelmed. I think this was a way for me to create intimacy, and to allow it to be off-kilter. It’s funny to see this work in the MSU Broad Art Museum, because Zaha Hadid’s architectural design is very asymmetrical, and has these extreme, oblique angles, so it is really well suited for this space.

Rail: I’m wondering if that dyad you mentioned of gravity and weightlessness—which I think is present in so much of your work—somehow maps onto the motion and stasis, binary or not? One of the things that I felt for a long time about your work is that you set out binaries, but somehow they manage to both always be true. It’s not an either/or proposition, it’s a both/and proposition. I’d like to think a little bit more about that question of motion, because that’s something you’ve already talked about—“Stand your ground”—but I think motion is something that often feels gendered as well. Now I’m thinking about your untitled 2013 work that references the story of Gradiva.

Al-Hadid: I’m glad you brought up the word binaries, because if I’ve learned anything in life, it is that everything exists on a spectrum. Everything. Everything really is a gradient, and I have a need to find nuance and not trust binaries. Movement and fluidity are essential parts of that philosophy. It’s about flexibility of mind. It’s very psychological. Depictions of women in motion, having agency, and in flight or mid-step—those are very appealing to me.

This drawing portrays the character, Gradiva, which is also the title of a novella by Wilhelm Jensen. Jensen, at the start of the twentieth century, became a source of inspiration for the Surrealists. I studied art history in undergrad, and was obsessed with the Surrealists, and the Dadaists especially. And you know, Salvador Dalí called Gala his Gradiva.

Gradiva is a character that is named after a Roman bas-relief sculpture. The novel tells the story of an archeologist who is this sort of stuffy academic, and he becomes fixated on this relief sculpture of a woman mid stride. She’s the “gradiva”, which translates into “the woman who walks.” In other translations, it’s “the woman who walks through walls,” which on its own is such a sculptural idea, that something can start as flat and become dimensional. That is essentially the setup for the cathedral in Spun of the Limits of my Lonely Waltz; there was a blueprint on the ground that was extruded to become dimensional form.

Anyway, the archeologist romanticizes this artwork and becomes sort of obsessed with it. He starts to hallucinate that he sees this character, Gradiva. He’s in Rome, and starts to imagine her as this apparition that he sees in the streets of Rome. He starts chasing her, and he chases her all the way to Pompeii, where he starts to hallucinate that Vesuvius is about to erupt, so time becomes really warped. Now he’s talking to this ghost, and eventually realizes that he’s been talking to his childhood crush, this woman Zoe. It’s a strange little story. Sigmund Freud made it very popular because he drew out this metaphor and basically took the story as an allegory of the psychoanalytic process. The archeologist was unearthing layers to kind of reach his subconscious desires, and he finally discovered what was compelling him: this sexual attraction to his childhood crush.

Jacques Derrida wrote about Gradiva in Archive Fever, which is a hard and complicated text. He’s basically criticizing Freud for narrowing everything to one specific origin, a specific scene that, like the act of archiving a memory, essentially produces loss. There’s a drive to reduce everything to a memory, to create an archive. But to move something from private to public brings up this issue of power, and of who gets to write history. You could ask: is this really about the past, or is it about building a future? It’s really interesting if you’re obsessed with this idea of archiving. It’s basically looking at how we create history, how we decide on history—on our collective memories—as a society.

Later I found another interpretation that I loved by Daniel Orrells called “Derrida’s Impression of Gradiva: Archive Fever and Antiquity” where Orrells wrote how art historians are essentially compelled by this impossible fantasy of trying to both witness the event and the archive simultaneously, and to basically see her footprint in the ash. At the end, there’s this moment where the archeologist sees Gradiva leave her footprint, her foot making this impression of the print in the ash, and this moment of trying to both capture the memory and archive it at the same time. He’s drawing out that these traces are actually traces of an absence, not of a presence.

Gradiva features heavily in my work. She shows up in sculptures and in panels and in drawings. She’s this character that is a figment of a male imagination, and she’s always on the move. That’s her defining characteristic, that she has one foot on the ground and one foot off the ground.

Rail: I know you’ve also drawn inspiration from Hans Memling.

Al-Hadid: Yes. Specifically from the character in the Hans Memling painting, Allegory of Chastity (1479–80). There’s a woman basically wearing a mountain as a skirt. I love allegories, so it was a really interesting and sort of subconscious pairing that I would show both of these figures together. The first time I showed them together was at the Vienna Secession. I made two diaphanous wall works, one of Gradiva in motion and one of the Allegory of Chastity. She’s sitting very politely on top of this mountain. My feminist reading is that she is holding in a volcanic eruption. That she isn’t really a victim. She is actually in command of her environment. That both of these stories or myths correspond to volcanos is interesting to me.

Rail: It’s so interesting that you brought up Derrida and the archive, because there are so many female protagonists who center your work. There’s this way that we could think about your work as a kind of archive for women, or a logic of the archive as a creative act, a kind of counter act.

This idea of a woman who is always in motion makes me think of the ways that we have different, gendered conceptions around the way people move. In the history of art, we have images of people in motion. I am thinking of Étienne-Jules Marey, who was the inventor of the chronophotograph, which was right after Eadweard Muybridge did his horse images. Marey wanted to still the human body moving, so he put white dots and white lines on the side of a man who he then asked to walk from one side of the room to the other. This was in the 1880s, and the whole idea was to graph the movement of the object, or in this case, the person. But of course, it’s a man who’s doing that kind of structured, scientific walking. And it was not just a man, it was a soldier. I was thinking about this earlier when you mentioned Spun of the Limits of my Lonely Waltz as a kind of battleground. There’s something interesting about this militaristic language, or the way in which movement gets coded as militaristic in a masculine realm, and is something else in a female realm.

Al-Hadid: It’s seductive in a female realm, right? It’s something that men chase after.

Rail: Which is what happens in the story of Gradiva.

Al-Hadid: So interesting—I never thought of it from a militaristic perspective. For men, it tends to show up as aggression and violence, and for women, it’s survival. It’s movement, and fluidity and escape and disturbance—not being pinned to one place or one definition or one existence, one way being right. I think that that’s what I really like, to tie this back into the title of the exhibition, unbecoming, that kind of shift, that stasis is more important than being right. The transition between states is what gives us power and agency.

Rail: I like that the word “unbecoming” isn’t just one thing. It’s both an adjective—like something is unbecoming, it’s not attractive—and a verb, as in “to unbecome.” And of course, Simone de Beauvoir talks about how one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. The concepts around how womanhood is construed can be oppressive, but they can also be freeing, and can be both at the same time.

So it’s about stepping into that plethora of perceptions around womanhood that aren’t static. And that makes perfect sense with the way that your work wants to always be in a liminal zone between binaries. I mean, Simone de Beauvoir was writing as an existentialist, and that’s exactly the place where the binary of self and other became so important in the definition of selfhood. It seems like an extremely appropriate title, both for the feminist dimension of the work and for the way that the work constantly moves between concepts on a spectrum.

Al-Hadid: I love that. When you’re unbecoming, it’s like it’s rude or disrespectful—to be unbecoming. I mean, I can say for myself, growing up, I was called a big mouth more than once. I was expected to be well behaved and polite and defer to men, and, you know, this is not specific to my upbringing as an Arab Muslim in Ohio.

What’s interesting about being a third-culture kid is that you have a front row seat to feminism in two different cultures. It was very easy to spot the restrictions that exist in Arab culture as a woman, and in American culture they’re so present but have a different flavor. I don’t know why I bring that up, but I’m just thinking about this criticism of being unbecoming or inappropriate, not polite, not sitting respectfully and holding yourself in, but instead being angry and being loud and rude and kind of breaking those codes.

Rail: That makes me think about the stories we learn as children, how they are a form of indoctrinating behavior when we’re young. One of the things that your work does so brilliantly is to find moments in narrative where those conventions get turned upside down. You can probe the convention through the figures that you bring into your work.

Al-Hadid: I wanted things to be upside down. I think Spun of the Limits of my Lonely Waltz was the first time that something was fully upside down in my work. But I did have several moments where I would literally turn a thing upside down, turn an image upside down, or turn a geographic map upside down. I love to see things from what’s conventionally understood to be the wrong point of view. I’m interested in how it upsets our proprioceptive sense, as well as our psychological sense.

Rail: I want to ask you about There was and there was not. . . a clever woman in disguise (2025). I’m curious if this conversation we’re having plays into the diptychs that are in this show? I’m thinking of the way that the diptychs bring to mind the idea of the storybook, or two different perspectives. I know they are new, and I’m curious to hear you talk more about the diptych structure. Maybe you can speak to There was and there was not. . . a clever woman in disguise?

Al-Hadid: Clever woman is one of the works that MSU generously commissioned. I made these with Dieu Donné, a paper making studio in Brooklyn. I was their lab grant resident a couple years ago, which meant they invited me to come about once a month, to experiment with this process—and boy, did I take to it!

It’s just weird, because I’ve never really worked that way. I’ve never drawn on paper. Even the Gradiva drawing that we talked about was made on Mylar, which is a transparent medium. So the ground is see-through, and I think I’ve always wanted to make marks on a ground like that because I feel like the marks kind of float on the surface. I couldn’t draw on traditional paper because it felt like the material was taking something from me. It’s hard to explain, but when I made a drawing out of paper it felt so sculptural, so natural to my studio process.

These marks are not sitting on top of the surface. They are embedded. The work is made through a really wet process and it’s super thin, practically on the verge of not existing. The layers of this thin paper are everything I wanted. I really loved working at Dieu Donné, so the curator at MSU, Rachel Winter, devised a plan where I could make another body of work. I look at so many small paintings, miniatures, not just the Northern Europeans, but also Islamic miniatures and Islamic paintings that are extremely tiny and detailed. There’s something about looking at the smallness of these marks and getting so close to the artist’s hand, getting so close to that intimate moment—I live for that. Despite how large scale and gestural and spatial my work can be, it really starts in this teeny-tiny way.

Rail: Can you describe what’s happening in There was and there was not. . . a foolish king (2025)?

Al-Hadid: I was thinking about stories told by women, specifically The Thousand and One Nights. I didn’t want to play into any kind of orientalizing of Arab culture, obviously. I wanted to personalize it. So the narrator is a woman named Scheherazade. The premise of the stories is that Sultan Shahryār was kind of taking his revenge on womankind because his wife was caught cheating. In a rage he decided to kill a new bride every night. Eventually, Scheherazade steps up. She has a plan, which is to tell stories that end with a cliffhanger, every night, that way the sultan will keep her alive to hear the rest of the story. She essentially rescues herself and then womankind with the power of her storytelling, with her creativity. It’s such an incredible notion. So momentous.

I was thinking about those stories, and I realized that I wanted to really make a scene about her, the storyteller—not the stories that she was telling. So I set up a camera and took a picture of myself as Scheherazade telling the stories, and then also as Dunyazad, her sister, who was also in the room. It shows a detail that can get overlooked: that it was Scheherazade, the sultan, and her sister in the room.

I’m fascinated by the inclusion of her sister. Why was she there? What purpose did she serve? Maybe she’s a stand in for the audience, so that we’re not implicated as the sultan hearing the stories. We’re with her, the sister. In this image I am both the listener and the storyteller. And then there’s a character in the middle. It’s kind of hard to see, because it’s heavily abstracted, but that’s my brother Sam, who was lounging on my mom’s couch when I went home for Thanksgiving. It’s a family scene, after all.

Rail: The background is so interesting.

Al-Hadid: Initially, I had a whole series where I had the figures set in the sultan’s bedroom, this kind of opulent palace interior, and the series didn’t feel right. I don’t know how many works I made, but I could tell something was off. They just weren’t working. Let me tell you, it is really uncomfortable to be working with people for a limited time, like at Dieu Donné, and have that feeling! But they very generously let me come back and keep working on the project. That’s when I put them in this ethereal landscape, so they were kind of within the stories, and it turned out a lot better.

I do these washes, just like pools of paper pulp, colorful paper pulp that reticulate and make these incredible textures and create all this depth. The pooling happens on a horizontal plane, and then the marks are made on a vertical plane where everything is dripping. In my work, from the drawing to the sculpture—everything is built.

Rail: I’m realizing, not for the first time, how these themes are woven through each of your individual pieces. There’s the feminism-motion narrative. You just mentioned this idea of pooling. Once you have a vocabulary of the concepts that are operative in your work, it’s easier to identify them in any single piece. I wanted to go back to Spun of the Limits of my Lonely Waltz and talk about how your footprints gave rise to an upside-down cathedral. Another direction we could take the question of motion is performativity. Not you as a performer, but the direction that motion has taken within art history and performance studies.

I think this is a two-part question. I’m thinking of Andy Warhol’s “Dance Diagram” series from 1962, black and white paintings that were on the floor showing the steps you would take as someone who wanted to learn how to do the Fox Trot or another dance. Your work isn’t didactic like that, but there is an element of viewer engagement. I mean, you have an untitled sculptural work that is floor based, and in the MSU show there is the large-scale Smoke Screen (2015) that you can walk through. I hadn’t known that Gradiva could be translated as “the woman who walks through walls,” but I like that connection in this exhibition particularly.

My question here is twofold: Is there something to thinking through the legacy of performance art or the participatory dimension of art? And then also, more straightforwardly, can you talk about how your work has been installed at MSU in Zaha Hadid’s unusually shaped galleries where you don’t have a conventional flat white surface on which to hang things?

Al-Hadid: I’m really glad that this bronze floor sculpture is included. It's weird, because it’s the only sculpture that is untitled. All of my works on Mylar are untitled, but this is the only sculpture. I started making it in 2014, but I didn’t finish it and just kept returning to it. I cast it first in wax and froze it so the wax was really cold. Then I dropped it so the wax cracked, and I poured hot wax onto it. I’m always playing with hot and cold materials. It becomes a mirror that doesn’t reflect, that’s corrupt, that breaks the relationship with the self. You can’t really look at yourself, but you’re inclined to. It’s interesting—by not producing a reflection it makes you very aware of your body.

I think sculpture is fundamentally performative, because you’re sharing the floor with this object. You have to navigate the space. You have to move around it. For me, I look behind, I look up, I look down, I look within. Most of my work—maybe not this particular piece, but so much of my work—you can see through. I don’t use transparent materials. The materials I use are typically opaque, but there is always a way of seeing through them. All of my large-scale installations, you can see into them. They don’t close off space to you. In fact, I hope they create more space than they take up.

Even though I make so many works that hang on walls in the tradition of painting, all of those were born from my sculptural practice, and from the materials that I use in my sculptures. I don’t think with images. I don’t start things with a picture of something in my mind. I’m more compelled by materials, by space, and by playing with my hands and experimenting with how things move and flow. I kind of have to find the thing.

I might start with a historic reference or an image that I take of something; there could be a combination of references that I put together. In large part that’s because I don’t know what to do with a blank page. I need to be creating in response to something. I cannot just conjure up something from absolute nothing. I really think through my hands, and I find the story as I’m making. I often don’t know where it’s going to go, or what I’m going to privilege in the work. Sometimes I’m responding to a material opportunity, something that’s opened up as I’m working. It’s hard to explain. Sometimes I think, “Oh, this material has allowed for this other narrative to come in.” And different themes get woven together. I don’t have a clear agenda from the start where I’m like, “I want this piece to be about this thing.” With the story of Scheherazade, I knew that was the starting point, but I didn’t know I would have so many failures until I figured out what the final image was going to be. I had so many versions of it! As I’m making, I’m finding the colors I want. It all happens in the moment; planning is really hard for me. I’d rather start with everything available, and then just make very intuitive moves. Even in my large-scale work, which looks like it could have been carefully mapped out, I start with something flat, extrude up, and see where it goes.