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The artist Mariam Haji places the audience as a voyeur in this project. Her autobiographical story visualises the marriage to her Finnish Lover, Hannes Särkkä, from its inception to finality. The works represent the transformative stages of the artist’s love to Hannes and the endurance marriage requires, her transition to motherhood, and the boundaries of their interracial relationship and their religious beliefs. These stages are aesthetically expressed through drawing, paintings, video and sculpture. Taking a Chance on Love is an autobiographical collection of varying artworks where the artist draws inspiration from reality and vulnerability and executes her art with transparency.

In the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible, the characters Utnapishtim and Nooh (Noah) release a dove with the hope to find new land, a place to call home. The artist’s life underwent similar circumstances from 2018 to 2022 when she could no longer create from the identity of Mariam Haji. In a fashion similar to Gilgamesh and Nooh (Noah), the artist released doves at funerals as an act of saying goodbye and letting go. She released the old to welcome in the new. Building on the autobiographical approach that ushered in her first name change from Maryam Aljanahi to Mariam Haji in her 2010 Muse Series, she has given herself a new artist name: Meri Helmi Särkkä, which is Finnish for Sea Pearl from the Salt Water Island. In other words, she is the Sea Pearl from Bahrain. Meri Helmi also maintains the initials M and H, which represent Mariam Haji and also Mariam and her husband Hannes. This re-naming signifies her profound transformation from daughter to single to wife and mother.

A poem written and narrated by the artist’s friend, a 63-year-old Syrian female poet called Samara Kafagi. The poem describes feminism from the viewpoint of an elderly Arab Muslim woman, eloquently spoken in the Arabic language.

This work of art follows the stereotypical European engagement with Arab culture and explores the disassociation between the two extreme streams of thought.

pays homage to Eugène Delacroix’s painting, Liberty Leading the People. Through emotion and intense colour, the artist aims to reincarnate the past to illuminate the present. She uses intense imagery to communicate a woman who achieves her ends irrespective of rank and status, conjuring feelings of ‘free will’ as an Arab woman.

In a progressive approach, the artist expresses her desire to show the Arab female identity in a disobedient manner by taking on the role of Marianne as the lead. She is seen holding up a cup of wine instead of a flag, with a bottle of wine in her other hand. This places the viewer in a position to question the artist: Is she a hedonist? Or is that the cup of salvation? and the wine a representation of the Blood of Christ? The audience is challenged to walk away from the stereotype of what it means to be an Arab woman.

From 2014 to 2016, the artist suffered severe arthritis in her fingers, Raynaud’s phenomenon in her hands, and other disorders that included extreme fatigue, burnout and depression. She struggled to draw because it hurt so much. She painted without reference to the external world with little to no interest in art history. She and her family interpreted her condition as an act of witchcraft that was committed against her. So, she spent that period of her life engaging with various types of religious and spiritual activities to receive healing. Desperate to find that touch from God, she created ink abstractions that were responding to Christian worship music. She combined the psychological and mythical expression through repetition and these paintings became that mystical process by means of entering into cosmic ethereal spaces.

The majority of works produced in this collection were purchased by a private collector.

It was in 2016 that the view of Arab society descended from one of noble status to one comprised of bloodthirsty killers. A time when ISIS was trending and so was hummus. The artist put Fins under the spotlight to taste a hummus infused with Finnish ingredients and asked the volunteers if they preferred a more European tasting hummus.

In these thought-provoking drawings of women at war, the rigid rules of society and culture are cast against those who hold opposing views. Showcasing an ethereal ink style, this work begs the question, which of the two render themselves closer to God: the punisher or the punished?

During the artist’s spiritual phase, she was invited by the Ministry of Culture in China for the Famous Arab Artist Workshop. She travelled despite the pain in her body and towards the end of the workshop in Beijing, she left the ink on the canvas to dry out in the sun. The sky turned grey moments later and heavy rain poured down from the Beijing sky over her canvas. The rain distorted the brushstrokes and created a unique pattern on the canvas.

Quote from the artist: ‘Voice of the Rain is a collaboration between the heavens and I. I dreamed about the water and the water came to my painting. It is very simple’.

Victory is inspired by Henri Regnault’s Automedon with the Horses of Achilles, 1868. The work pays homage to that painting, with inspiration from great feminists. The artist is replacing Automedon with her self-portrait, but it is not only ‘her self’; the depiction encapsulates other historical heroines from the East and West such as Shajarat Al-Durr, the Trưng Sisters, those in Shahnameh and Rabaa Al-Adawiya, and women from the West like Joan of Arc, Brunhilde and Queen Artemisia.

In this large-scale charcoal drawing, the artist, through the use of symbolism to create narrative, examines the subject of ‘conquest’ from the perspective of an Arab woman.

Premonition follows the perspective of a Bahraini female critiquing European women in Renaissance art. Women in Renaissance art were depicted frequently as immortal characters void of their humanity – either as the Virgin Madonna within churches or as sensual Goddesses such as Botticelli’s Venus, as widely patronized by the Medicis. The artist’s aim is to challenge if not reverse the roles where the female turns from being an object of neither holiness nor desire, which is still common in contemporary Bahraini society, into a confrontational mortal character capable of wounding wild beasts and participating in strife.

The project consists of two large-scale drawings. The first drawing is of the artist wrestling with a lion and the second is of the lion being struck by light. Both share qualities akin to the aesthetics of Renaissance art and are autobiographical to the artist’s struggle with her religious views: the desire to please God conflicting with her desire to oppose a religious lifestyle that seemed incompatible with Bahraini culture.

In winter 2011, the artist participated in artist residency at TAKT Berlin. During that time, she explored the notion of a woman’s body in a public space and modesty culture. The artist was seen performing contemporary dances underneath a transparent veil in public spaces as well as allowing her body to be touched by the public during the exhibition. She opened that, with the use of tape, the public can make a mould of her body – something that appeared like a cocoon which she could step outside of and find a sense of rebirth from society’s moulds and labels.

In Bahraini and Islamic culture, a thebiha ذبيحة (or nether نذر) occurs when a person lays down their will or ego by slaughtering a sheep, bull or goat and pouring out the animal’s blood as a sacrifice in return for a blessing from God – or an answered prayer.

The artist performed a sacrifice in her work where she portrayed herself in the drawing Killing a Minotaur, a symbol she created that represents herself subduing violently her sexual lusts in order to gain favour by God and freedom from that burden to create art from a place that is not tortured by the ‘Muse’. After this work was created, the artist underwent a name change from Maryam Aljanahi, the young girl who was under her father in a traditional Bahraini sense, to Mariam Haji, the name she chose to represent herself as an independent female Arab artist. Freedom from the Muse is part of the Permanent Collection of the National Museum of Bahrain. Kill the Muse remains available for collection.

Is a video of the artist walking with the artist Alessandro Rauschmann on his knees like a dog, while wearing a daffa, a traditional Bahraini Islamic apparel. The video is the re-enactment of Western feminist icon Valie Export at the peak of the feminist movement in Europe, where she did the same on the streets of Vienna in 1968. The opportunity to explore this subject was a suggestion by the German artist Alessandro Rauschmann, with the intention to re-enact Western art history in Bahrain. I agreed because I wanted to experience the radical, the forbidden, the rebellious and more importantly, feminism as I knew it in 2010.

is a sculpture installation that forms a representation of the power and will of women. As a female artist, birth can be seen as analogous to creation. This procreation is now Army of Mariam.

The ‘army’ is an army of women, which is something that essentially doesn’t exist, at least not in terms of the pejorative associations we have with an army. The artist’s prolonged obsession with the placenta resulted in seeking the mortal/immortal aspect of the organ being the source of existence and death. The artist holds on to the image of her placenta back in her mother’s uterus only to find the secrets of immortality and armies of women from descendants past. Mariam’s Army is a product of Mariam’s psyche and is not employed for destructive power or war. Army of Mariam fights another type of war; they’re their own psychological entity in battle and are not part of mankind. These characters are portraits of real women from the Middle East whom the artist has chosen to be part of her army; they extend themselves as women who take control of their will. The internally lit sculptures vary in sizes, from seven to eleven inches tall and five to ten inches in diameter. The strategic use of paper was intentional to replicate the degenerative decay of flesh. Paper also served as a metaphor for emotional vulnerability; an object that does not resist damage.

The artist expresses her freedom of imagination through role-play with her different individual characters. The production of this army satisfies more than a sense of imagination and making art; rather, it creates a dialogue between the artist and her personal attachment to her mother’s uterus.

is a series of drawings that question our preconceptions of human normality by considering images of physical abjection and emotional vulnerability. Here the artist endeavours to address issues of ‘normal’ society’s reaction towards bodily disfigurement. The works presented are a synthesis of drawn and montage images using as reference late 19th century and early 20th century ‘freak show’ photographs. The conceptual concerns underlying these works have been referenced by my research and reading of psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s writings on the abject and by using my own understanding of her theory addressing ‘normal’ society’s reaction towards bodily disfigurement dating from the late 19th century. The Unlovely aims to let the abject assume its potential power by reminding us of the precarious nature of our own ‘stable’ normal identities.