T-shirt 03

The Old ‘New World’

Project description:

‘FAN AL’IMAARAH’ The Art of Building Series

Project 0166 ‘ The Art of Building’ series is a playful collection of T-shirts loaded with individual and shared meaning, whilst casting a light on the wonderful yet equally frustrating world of transliteration!

T-Shirt 03 - The old ‘New World’. There’s something rather sad and tragic about the success and subsequent decline of Modernism. The ushering in of a bold new world seems to be a consigned to a distant memory, it wasn’t all bad, was it?

The collection is also in part a commentary on migrant communities having to come to terms with the gradual loss and degradation of language and its cross generational impact. In particular, the inventive ways in which 2nd/3rd gen migrants use transliteration as a means of communicating and bridging the gap between the generations (WhatsApp anyone?). It’s all so confusing lol.

The Arabic for ‘Art of building’ has been transliterated into the Latin alphabet, whilst our studio initials ‘SA’ have been transliterated into Arabic, which is a little ironic, as they originate from the Arabic letters ‘س’ and ‘ع’ anyway 🤣.

Here’s a shout out to all those poor souls who have had the misfortune of having their names incorrectly transliterated and with it, all those years of pain and mispronunciation. We feel for you! we really do 😔.