Photo: work by Amirra Malak

Sewing Seeds

Alexandria Saleem, Amirra Malak, Ara Manoogian, Bint Bandora, Jenna Saadeh, ‘Rah Sabino, Rodia Banaei, Sarah Farahat, Zeinab Saab

August 1 - 30, 2026

Opening Reception

Thursday, August 6th, 6-9 pm

First Saturday

August 1st, 12-5 pm

Open Hours

Sat-Sun 12-5 pm
drop in or by appointment 

Email info@carnationcontemporary.com
to schedule a visit

EXHIBITION

Rooted in decolonial research practices, Sewing Seeds positions the artist’s body as a living archive of ancestral relationships documented through sense, intuition, memory, and grief. Over the course of two years, a collective textile installation by nine SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) artists emerged. Their work explores ancestral relationships to seed, land, memory, migration, and displacement. Through contemporary and traditional textile practices, the work traces the dissonance of generational uprooting and the impossibility of return under ongoing imperial conditions. Many of the woven pieces contain seeds and plantcestors— living relatives and ancestral collaborators carrying the memory of land and people across generations. Both prayer and offering, the work is intended to outlive its makers. As an archive and seed bank, the work insists that cultural inheritance is not only remembered—it is cultivated. In resisting cultural erasure, Sewing Seeds dreams into SWANA futures rooted in borderless kinship and collective nourishment.


ARTISTS
Sewing Seeds, curated by Sarah Farahat + Alexandria Saleem, is a group exhibition of nine SWANA Artists of Portland working with indigenous plants that investigate memory, migration, land, and grief.