All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies. Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (1986). 

Aidha Badr’s, Brooklyn-born and Cyprus-based visual artist, whose work explores memories, daydreaming and the intricacies of female desire, mesmerising solo presentation at Jossa by Alserkal Avenue curated by Océane Sailly, founder of Hunna Art Gallery, reminds us of the incomparable power of painting as a medium to transmit and translate emotions. Building from Anne Carson’s, Canadian poet, essayist and classicist, seminal monograph Eros the Bittersweet exploring the intricacies of desire, Badr’s show When I Desire You A Part Of Me Is Gone seeks to untangle the roots of female desire by using memory as a medium to explore theories of attachment. 

For Badr, memories and desire are intrinsically linked with her mother. In a cleverly curated show organised as a jaunt to her innerworld, the artist scrutinises the relationship between a mother figure and childhood and the early stages of a girl’s development. This relationship that children often enact through play, is arguably the best exemplified by Her Cloth Was Cut From Heaven, She Wished To Be Me And I Wished To Be Her (2021), a depiction of a young girl’s attachment to her doll. By nurturing, dressing and cuddling the doll, the little girl replays the role of the mother, thus subconsciously constructing a strict set of beliefs about what a woman essentially is and what she must become through this process. In this painting, we also see the motherly figure holding a tiny, distant red sun between her fingers. This recurring motif in Badr’s work comes from Johnny Cash’s song You Are My Sunshine, which her doll would automatically sing after pressing the button on her stomach. The iteration of the red sun from one painting to another has also a symbolic meaning as it highlights the way the past intertwines with the present and how a memory–whether an object, a place or person–can long-lastingly infuse and shape one’s memory. 

Memories and the attachment to them is another central theme in Badr’s work. A starting point for understanding Badr’s interest in them is Alexandria, an ancient city known for nurturing a number of significant modernists including Mahmoud Saïd (1897-1964), Seif Wanly (1906-1979) and Hussein Bicar (1913-2002), and all the sweet memories the artist made there in her grandfather’s house. Badr’s attachment and longing for her grandfather is evident in My Grandfather’s House The Way I Remember It (2022), where she directly refers to a specific period of her childhood spent in the city of Alexander the Great–a magical time with her beloved grandfather whom she recreates through the memories of drying laundry, the ladybug clicker toy, his coffee pot, a comb with white hair, a bottle of eau de Cologne and the misbahạ. An attempt to cope with the grief of his absence, Badr immortalises her grandfather through a careful exploration of her memories with him. 

Love and attachment walk hand in hand in Badr’s work: the stronger the love, the stronger the fear of losing the loved ones. The artist explored the aftermath of death in her 2019 series of female figures lounging and doing ordinary chores such as waiting for laundry in Roommates In Heaven, Draw Four and Laundry Day presenting scenes that were almost hopeful in their serenity. The theme continues in Grief Is Love With Nowhere To Go (2022), a portrayal of herself seated on the chequered tiles, surrounded by objects that embody her attachment to the time in Alexandria, a time she bids farewell while accepting her grief with open arms. Despite the paintings’ personal background and significance, Badr manages to discuss the topic with universality that can escape her own experiences suggesting that grief has become an ultimate desire as reuniting with a loved one on the Earth will remain impossible forever. 

Another trajectory dealing with love and attachment in Badr’s work has to do with her delicate portraits of women. Badr’s concentration on portraiture began with self-portraits which mark the dawn of her career and the transition from an art student to an artist. Afterwards, Badr moved on to portraits of women who have impacted her life, resemble her mother and who possess characteristics such as nurturing, loving and caring–attributes that guide Badr’s understanding of womanhood. The exhibition, which ultimately seems to be a celebration of femininity, epitomises Badr’s image of a woman: vulnerable yet strong, domestic yet free, nurturing yet sensual. Although Badr recognises the societal pressures that often drive women towards such qualities and the encompassing woman-as-a-caregiver configuration, her works are not to be read as a critique but a celebration of such characteristics and positions. Above all, Badr’s female characters have agency and they do not merely exist in order to fulfil their role but are protagonists in their own stories, existing independently despite the surrounding expectations in a space Badr calls ‘between heaven and earth’, an area not to be defined in a spiritual sense but rather by its absence of spatiality, a kind of non-space, where the red sun unifies the women’s experiences. 

The women in Badr’s world are unapologetic about their desires. They sit boldly in their portraits in a dreamy terrain fusing love and desire,  resulting to an atmosphere that is accentuated by titles such as Desire Tripled Is Love, And Love Tripled Is Madness(2021), When I Desire You A Part Of Me Is Gone (2021) and The Hardest Part About Losing A Love Is Watching The Year Repeat Its Days (2021). In her pursuit of exploring the intricacies of female desire, Badr joins the ranks of earlier generations of artists dealing with the very topic. The Lebanese Huguette Caland (1931-2019) and Palestinian Juliana Seraphim (1934-2005), for instance, examined female desire through the lenses of sexuality and lust. Whereas for Caland and Seraphim desire was inherently corporeal and politically motivated as it was so closely linked to liberation, for Badr it is more a question of attachment and the myriad of possibilities projected into the space between the object of one’s desire and the needs and promises projected onto it. In this sense, Badr’s figures depict women as both the desired and the desiring. Driven by Carson’s understanding of desire, seen as an entity that cannot exist without the lack of what we seek, the very presence of it in Badr’s paintings does not lead to anything. Desire, in this sense, is a promise that can never be ultimately fulfilled. There is no final destination but a constant search. 

Badr’s world is one of wonder and reflection. Driven by her need to make sense of the world around her, Badr’s work examines the fading of the personal and the public, creating a discursive space which articulates her generation’s freedom from the older ones. In a space where the artist’s gaze is inherently in-ward looking and the personal takes precedence over the political, Badr eloquently negotiates her position as an artist who addresses her inner world and beliefs. Badr’s paintings demonstrate how her pounderings, personal dreamscapes and ideals about women result in engaging narratives dealing with universally recognisable themes which offer viewers a space to reflect and relate. Badr’s timeless depictions of femininity and womanhood both decipher and construct a sensual, mysterious layer often synonymous with women without diminishing their agency. Redolent with beauty and independence while unmasking topics such as desire, childhood, memories and death, the artist’s emotive portraits are unapologetic odes to her highest values: love and beauty.

Aidha Badr’s solo exhibition When I Desire You A Part Of Me Is Gone at Jossa by Alserkal closes on 5 June 2022. See more details here.