Guided by her aunts and grandmother, Sobia Ahmad is learning to make a traditional South Asian woven bed that was a stage upon which life unfolded in the courtyard of her childhood home in Pakistan. This object performs many functions in domestic settings; it is a daybed, a surface to clean rice or dry chilies on, a place to host guests, just to name a few. While an artist in residence with Gist Yarn, Ahmad will focus on weaving in a community setting to expand the functionality of the bed in a new context. Through this work, she is interested in asking: How does a culturally-specific object transmute materially and socially through memory and migration? Can this object catalyze conversations about rest and storytelling as emancipatory practices in a productivity-obsessed environment? 

Sobia Ahmad is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores how our deeply intimate struggles of belonging can inform larger conversations about migration, the tenuous notions of home, personal memory, and cultural porosity. Exploring her ancestral knowledge, she reimagines craft rituals and intergenerational storytelling as acts of liberation. Ahmad has exhibited internationally, including at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, New York), Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles), Queen Mary University (London), Museum of Craft and Design (San Francisco), and the Women Filmmakers Festival at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.).