Shamshiruddin

plastic, cardboard, fabric, wood, 18”x 26”x 10”, 2024.

Shamshiruddin is a doll crafted from recycled plastic, cardboard, wood, and fabric scraps, encased in a chiffon skin embroidered with the repeating name of Allah. Discarded materials are reborn as the creative substance of this primordial form.

With hanging threads, wrinkles, visible stitches, and a crooked posture, the labor of crafting Shamshiruddin becomes apparent. Its appearance serves as a reflection on the current material realities of ecological disasters and depleted resources, which fuel conflicts worldwide. 

Shamshiruddin embodies memorial, prayer, protection, birth, and death. It encapsulates patience and imperfection, heaviness and delicacy. It is the spiritual essence that strengthens resistance in the face of struggle—a contradiction in a world of unraveling contradictions, folding in on itself and looking to the past to navigate the future.