Dominik Czechowski and Tamzin Plummer reflect on a year of exciting work with the Date Palm Tree Group and artist Farwa Moledina. You can visit the exhibition Back Toward Oneness in the Ground Floor Gallery until 9 March 2025.
Back in spring 2024, we commissioned Farwa Moledina to work alongside the Date Palm Tree Group. We loved the way Farwa weaves together different themes of cultural identity and personal narrative through her use of textiles, particularly incorporating hand-woven fabrics or recycled hijabs. It connects deeply to themes of craft and memory, using materials with a strong sense of history and tradition. Textiles have historically been seen as a female, domestic craft. They’ve been enormously under-appreciated as artworks. Farwa’s work is part of a textiles resurgence, reclaiming and repositioning such practice both in terms of art history and in terms of how female work is perceived and valued.
We also loved the collaborative nature of Farwa’s work. She draws upon and collaborates with other practitioners, she’s very community-orientated, and in that sense her practice is socially engaged. Fusing her own personal narrative alongside wider themes of community heritage and cultural background, she highlights underrepresented voices. These voices are really at the forefront of this exhibition. Children’s drawings are literally woven into her artworks as they are built out of what she created with the Date Palm Tree Group in our sessions over the past year. If you look at the wallpaper or the main sculpture in the exhibition, everything contains the drawings and creative output of the children and their mothers.
Farwa and the members of the Date Palm Tree Group also share a cultural heritage as Muslim women. Set up as a support group for Muslim mothers in the area, it is an incredibly warm and welcoming place, and you could feel the strong ties within the community. Listening to the conversations, understanding how they support one another – that deep sense of mutual care and shared purpose really radiated outwards. We were privileged to get to know some of the participants and learn more about their cultural heritage, thanks to their incredible sense of welcome which is hopefully embedded within this exhibition.
Each of our sessions at the Bullingdon Community Centre catered to children and adults of all ages. Babies joined us for our early years Make Play sessions, which focused on creative sensory play. Older children took part in the workshops with their mothers. In the adjacent room, women could sit, chat and eat together whilst their children played. The gradual flow between the spaces created a really collaborative and conversational atmosphere.
Since these sessions, we’ve been working directly with Farwa to finalise the artworks, the space and the layout. Everything you see in the Ground Floor Gallery is a new commission rooted in these collaborative workshops. We’ve been brainstorming and discussing ideas, exchanging thoughts on how we might include a Make Play corner as part of the gallery space and the overall installation. Members of the Date Palm Tree Group have helped to co-write one of the labels, and we’ve had the chance to write the rest of the interpretation alongside Farwa, who shared quotations, feedback and her own reflections. Our incredible Production team built the wooden frame of the freestanding sculpture, and we’ve been loaned original artworks from some of the young artists who joined their mothers at our workshops. These pieces have been specially hung at a lower height to make sure that everybody can enjoy seeing their work in the gallery, and we’re excited to add new pieces to the exhibition over its course.
For our final workshop (taking place next month), we’ve invited all of the participants to join us in the gallery, surrounded by their artworks, to create new drawings for one more commission. Together with Moledina they’ll be designing floor mats, which will become part of our Studio and can be used in our on-site Make Play sessions going forward. We hope that it’s a way of weaving these incredible artists into the broader Modern Art Oxford community and continuing our creative relationships.
When you visit, we hope you’ll embrace the idea of integrated collaboration, of co-creation and co-authorship between a trained artist and a community group. We hope that people of every age will enjoy this exhibition, and that there’s a sense of the trajectory from some of the earliest drawings through to commissioned works from a professional artist. A sense of possibility and of genuine co-creativity.
We hope that you feel represented and welcome – whether that’s as a person of faith, someone with a shared cultural heritage, as a parent or carer, as a member of Bullingdon’s vibrant community, or as someone who’s interested in contemporary art and excited about the opportunity to create with us. Although this exhibition is deeply rooted in a particular community of practice and heritage, its foundational concept of ‘ummah’ is universal. We hope that with the wallpaper, the mats and cushions in the space to sit and make, our gallery will feel not only welcoming, but a bit like a domestic space. By filling the gallery with textiles, patterns and this sense of domesticity, we’re echoing the warmth of the welcome we received from the Date Palm Tree Group. We hope that when you step inside, you’ll recognise that you are creative and that you too can share with others. Farwa and the Date Palm Tree Group’s incredible work has made this beautiful space feel welcome, safe, inclusive, representative and empowering. That’s at the heart of what we do here at Modern Art Oxford, and we can’t wait for you to join us.