Finding home through art

When Saber first found out that he had been awarded an Artist Protection Fund Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), he was hiding under a table.

His wife, Shatha, was having a call with the Artist Protection Fund, the American Foundation who had offered her a fellowship, and had just announced to her that she would be hosted by IASH.

When they asked where Saber was, Shatha hesitated, then pointed underneath the table. As always when she was on an online call, he was hiding there, encouraging and prompting Shatha and giving her little hints when she got stuck. But once he had crawled, laughingly, out from under the table and heard the final piece of news from the Artist Protection Fund, it was Saber who was lost for words. Not only would Shatha be travelling to Edinburgh, he, too, had been offered a fellowship with IASH.

Though neither of them knew much about Edinburgh or Scotland, the couple was overjoyed. As Shatha explains, “the fact that Saber could come with me, that was my celebration. I didn’t care where, as long as Saber was with me”.

Saber and Shatha had met as students. They were both studying IT, but their real passion was for the arts: music, in Saber’s case, and the visual arts in Shatha’s.

Whilst they had been creating art privately for years, it was only after they married that they started showcasing their work, initially at home, among friends, and then to the wider public. Their performances in cafes - Saber playing the piano, Shatha painting - quickly gained popularity.

It was rare to see a couple making art together in Yemen, and families would gather to watch them, forgetting for a while even the sound of bombardments in the mountains surrounding the city.

Although their art was never political, it drew the attention and suspicion of the militia, and, following threats, they were forced to suspend their artistic activities in 2018.

After spending two years looking for opportunities to leave Yemen, they were awarded the IASH Artist-at-Risk fellowship in 2020.

Receiving the award was, however, just the beginning of a long and arduous journey. Leaving Yemen is no straightforward endeavour, and from the capital Sana’a, Shatha and Saber had to travel for several days to reach an airport, passing through multiple checkpoints on the way, and claiming that they were on their way to Cairo for Shatha to receive medical treatment. They had not even told their families about their plans to leave Yemen. 

Arriving in November 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, their first impression of Edinburgh was of a “city of ghosts”. Empty streets, masked faces (making it even more difficult to understand the Scottish accent!) and galleries and concert halls that were closed due to the pandemic; these were not ideal conditions for two artists trying to establish themselves in a completely new environment.

However, after three years of censorship, they wanted, as they say, to “explode art”.

They took advantage of every opportunity that came their way: Saber recorded his second album, “Embrace from Edinburgh”, and in her exhibition “White Canvas”, Shatha explored what it meant for families in Yemen to live through the exceptional times of the war, a different kind of “lockdown”, that had already lasted seven years.

On a whim, she also applied for the John Byrne Award and won the first prize for her visual art and writing. At this time, Saber and Shatha were also approached by the founders of Art27, a new Edinburgh-based cultural rights organisation, and contributed to their Gala Day at the Southside Community Centre, for which they created an original play, “Saber Came to Tea”.  

After their Fellowship at IASH came to an end Shatha and Saber remained involved in Art27.

Having been granted asylum in the UK, they were keen to pursue their artistic careers further in Edinburgh. Through Art27, they performed “Saber Came to Tea” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2022, at which Saber also coordinated five other shows for Art27.

After their successful collaboration during the Fringe, Saber joined Art27 as a Digital Communication Officer and Project Coordinator. His role involved coordinating the 2023 Migration Festival, a celebration of different cultures in Edinburgh’s Southside. For the festival, Shatha created an art installation entitled “Inherited Incantations”.

A community project, the installation was the culmination of a series of workshops held with women of Edinburgh from diverse backgrounds. In the workshops, they discussed objects and rituals that they and other women in their families kept to protect their loved ones. They found that many of them were similar across the different countries and continents that women came from.

Shatha also collaborated with a Yemeni organisation, which enabled women in Yemen to participate in the project remotely with sketches on the same themes. To do justice to their work and showcase it in the Edinburgh installation, Shatha learnt printmaking, a medium she had never used before. Ever keen to broaden her artistic horizons, she also learnt how to create digital art as part of another contribution to the Migration Festival.

The musical ensemble, “The Other”, that performed at the Festival, had asked her to produce some visual art to be projected onto the screen as they performed. Shatha quickly realised that her usual oil paintings would not work well for this purpose, and instead, she undertook a course in digital art, another medium she had not previously worked in. 

Both Shatha and Saber continued collaborating with the group, “The Other”, and will be performing with them as part of their Edinburgh Fringe Festival Show this August.

This time, however, Shatha’s contribution will not be visual, but verbal, in the form of a very personal poem about her life in Yemen and Edinburgh. Rather than writing in her native Arabic, Shatha has turned to English. Given the sensitive subject matter, she feels that the Arabic language poses a barrier and that English better allows her to express the sense of freedom she has experienced since coming to Scotland.

It was only in Edinburgh that she was free to leave the house alone, and as a result, she got to know the city better than she had ever known her hometown in Yemen. Ever since arriving, Shatha has worked to make Edinburgh her home. Small everyday actions, such as joining the English language classes offered by the Welcoming, or even buying something from one of Edinburgh’s secondhand shops, have helped her to make memories and feel like she is part of the city, not just as an artist, but as a person.

Shatha and Saber have also built connections beyond Edinburgh, getting involved in Scotland-wide organisations such as Creative Scotland and the Cultural Collective.

During the pandemic, they joined various support networks for artists, for example, the Mutual Affinities Learning Lab, which met four times a year to discuss how to bridge the gap between artists and organisations.

While Shatha and Saber could see how all artists struggled during the pandemic, they found that their background made it particularly difficult to keep up with the competition for the limited funding that was available. “There are no arts schools in Yemen, you cannot study music”, they point out, and they never had access to the same resources, facilities and opportunities as artists in Scotland. International organisations that offer funding to artists from Yemen do not sufficiently take these circumstances into consideration, they explain. Nor do they do normally factor in how challenging it is to leave the country, whether due to the difficulty of obtaining a visa, or, in the case of women, the requirement of travelling with a male chaperone, whose costs also need to be covered.

Shatha and Saber have been supporting artists in Yemen remotely to navigate these challenges and apply for residencies and scholarships abroad. Saber has also been raising awareness of these challenges among funders and the artistic community. Speaking at the Res Artists Conference in London, for example, he highlighted that Yemeni artists are particularly under-represented and have been largely forgotten by the international community. 

Having access to the arts is not just a personal matter for Shatha and Saber but has become a bigger cause that they are championing.

The notion of accessibility does not really feature in the Yemeni context, Saber explains, where it is all about survival. As a result, the arts have been neglected - yet they are, as Saber says, “what makes us human” and can play a crucial role in helping people heal from trauma and build peace. Learning about how the arts are being made more inclusive for people with visual impairments or wheelchair users in Scotland, has made Saber and Shatha realise how urgently such efforts are needed in their home country, where so many people have sustained injuries due to the war.

Since coming to Edinburgh, Shatha and Saber have also been inspired by the history of the city’s post-war festival scene, the central role that refugees played in creating it, and how it helped Scotland recover from World War II.

They feel that much of this knowledge, along with an understanding of accessibility, can be transferred to the Yemeni context, and they hope to be part of the efforts to rebuild the country through the arts.