Visual Artist & Community Art Practitioner 

Artists Paria Moazemi Goodarzi and Francisco Andres Llinas Casas in collaboration with Sakinah Women's Group 'Al Meezan' and with the help of Glasgow Museum Resource Centre, have produced this collection of objects in response to notions of cultural hybridity, displacement, representation, intersubjective sense of belonging, and museums as spaces for alternative critical learning.
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Sakinah Women’s Group were invited to produce a series of Scottish Quaichs in Papier-Mâché over a series of workshops facilitated by the artists. Pieces were later decorated by participants, responding to Middle Eastern objects in the museum’s collection and a discussion with the museum’s curator of Islamic Art.

The finished pieces serve as embodiments of cultural hybridity and draw an analogy between the displaced nature of the museum object and the group’s stories of migration. The work also reflects on the role of the museum space as the place for cultural representation of contemporary British society confronted by the colonial reality of its collection and building. Moreover, the reproduction of Quaichs in a paper medium and by Muslim hands, comments on the function of the finished object in contrast to the original purpose of Quaichs as ceremonial vessels for alcohol drinking. 

The work will remain in the museum’s civic collection as a tangible historical record of the true nature of our contemporary society, and as evidence of the processes through which nationhood, culture and society are negotiated, transformed and represented.