About Salma

Salma Ahmad Caller was born in Iraq to an Egyptian father and a British mother and grew up in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. She now lives in the UK. An artist , art historian and writer who is a hybrid of cultures and faiths she is drawn to hybrid and ornamental forms, and to how the body expresses itself in the mind to create an embodied ‘image’. She is particularly interested in the cross-cultural and in mixed-race identities, experiences and embodiment. Her work embraces collage, drawing, watercolour, photography, projection, installation and sound. Salma also writes art theory, poetry and creative non-fiction, with a theoretical background in research on the meanings of ornament in non-Western cultures through frameworks of anthropology of art and cognitive science, with the aim of contributing to the decolonisation of art history and theory and breaking down boundaries and categories that support hegemonic colonial and patriarchal formations.

With a Masters in art history and art theory, and a background in medicine and pharmacology, and several years teaching cross-cultural ways of seeing via non-Western artefacts at Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, she now works as an independent artist and teacher. 

Click here for Recent Projects and Media 2020/2021

Instagram:

@salmacaller

Read her autobiographical essay on the intertwining of art and life here:

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/muhammad-ali-came-tea-discordia-concors/

Artist Statement:

My art practice has emerged from an immersion in the study of medicine and body sciences for over a decade, in Saudi Arabia and in the UK, and from my cross-cultural experiences and hybrid status as both Egyptian and British. It also emerges from the study of the anthropology of art and the exploration and search for embodied modes of creating, seeing and being.

The lineages of self-taught artists that connect their body\mind to other knowledge formations and experiences are complex and varied. Other fields can then be brought into dialogue with aesthetic and art historical forms, and often disruptive or radical elements are introduced into mainstream discourse. Drawing on these lineages, I use my process to tease out and investigate my own subjective experience of the ways in which cultures and hegemonies create and construct body image and identity and how they also profoundly construct the physical senses of the body, our sensations, carving out what we can or cannot see or feel. How cross-generational trauma and experience is a residue of the body.

The significant form in my work is collage, with photography, drawing, text and sound. Collage has both a disruptive and a healing power to bring contradictions and oppositions into intimate conversation. I use physical collages of found materials, old family photographs, colonial representations of Middle Eastern women, contemporary fashion magazine images of women, and personal and inherited objects belonging to my parents. So-called ornament functions in my work to express the visceral, sensational and emotional ways in which we both feel and understand - where body knowledge is inseparable from 'mind'. Teaching cross-cultural ways of seeing and running art workshops have also been a significant part of my practice.

I aim to create an imagery of the narratives of body that have shaped my own body and identity across the profound cultural divides of my upbringing. My art and writing, inseparable from each other, arise from a fault line running through my identity. Egyptian father and English mother. A childhood in Nigeria and youth in Saudi Arabia, current life in the UK. Intense confrontation holds hands with joyful meeting. Across the fault line weaving back and forth are threads and vines. Embroidery is painful, beautiful, vines are binding, bewildering. Scars are the same as embroidery and vines. Ruptures held. Grown from the body.