Ramah AlHuessini's practice is centred around navigating identity and questioning notions of home and belonging. Her 'Fruit Salad' series plays on the art historical significance of fruit and its strong presence in Arab Culture. Each ceramic piece is a composite object, the hybrid sum of three different fruits - what you see is vaguely recognisable and identifiable as a fruit, yet it alludes definitive categorisation, This uncertainty aims to mirror the feeling of dislocation felt by immigrants the world over, playing on notions of exoticism and otherness which often accompany such experiences. The pieces in the 'Fruit Salad' series have melancholy features: they're consumed by thought, irritated by the complexity of identity and the repeated question "but where are you really from?"

 

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"Humour, as well as notes of the grotesque and metaphorically marginal spaces permeate the work of Ramah Al-Husseini. She interrogates and manifests the anxiety of identity in her excellently dead-pan ‘Fruit Salad’ series of paintings and ceramic sculptures. Each piece is an anthropomorphic hybrid of three different fruits resulting in a new, unique, category defying fruit portrait."

Excerpt from Field of Difference, an essay by Nick Hackworth