The rupture of the sacred, the fragmentation of the archive. Doom Scroll Djinn Tapestry emerges from the interstice where the digital phantasmagoria meets the material ruins of devotion. I was trying to make sense of the estimated 10 million Muslims killed by Western Imperialism since World War 2, the remnants of their livelihoods flickering on our screens daily. Here, prayer rugs collected on markets in Cairo—once stable coordinates in a spiritual geography—are cut, spliced, and re-stitched into patchworks; assembled as a palimpsest of displacement, their fractured surfaces bearing witness to the violence of circulation: the algorithmic, the colonial, the market-driven.
On one side, pseudo-Arabic calligraphy utters words of combustion—“spit fire,” “smokeless fire”—the lexicon of the djinn, those unseen entities that dwell at the thresholds of perception. The djinn, like the algorithm, exist in the liminal, the unseen, the infrastructural. They are neither wholly present nor absent but flicker in the cracks of empire, in the doom scroll, in the ceaseless flood of images that animate and anesthetize in equal measure. The fire without smoke is the image without body, the rage without a locus, the displacement of presence into pure affect.
The third tapestry shows calligraphy of the Surah An-Nisa 4:75; “And what is [the matter] with you that you fight not in the cause of Allah and for the oppressed among men, women, and children..." ( invoking the duty to rise against oppression. Here, scripture is both invocation and subversion. The prayer mat, once an intimate conduit between the believer and the divine, becomes an artifact of longing, of forced movement. It asks: what is a prayer when its ground is uprooted? What is solidarity when the algorithm feeds only the spectacle of suffering?
The stitching, the thread binding torn surfaces, becomes a gesture of counter-memory, of refusal, also an act of repair. To sew is to insist on continuity, to refuse erasure. It is an act of care—not one that pretends to restore what has been lost but one that insists on new forms of relation. These sutures do not mask the wounds; they trace them, honor them, make them visible. In this way, the tapestry does not simply mourn—it proposes. It does not only archive rupture—it gestures toward healing, toward a future where the fragmented is not discarded but reassembled into a different kind of wholeness, one that holds the memory of its own survival.
