Abeer Seikaly is a Jordanian-Palestinian transdisciplinary thinker and maker, who works across architecture, design, fine art, and cultural production.
She founded Studio Abeer Seikaly in Amman, Jordan, in 2010. Abeer’s practice is grounded in ‘acts of memory’: journaling, documenting, archiving, and collecting. She weaves ‘narrative threads’ from these memories.
Abeer draws inspiration from traditional knowledge in the Arab homeland. She views her practice as a social technology for cultural empowerment. She centers indigenous Bedouin practices, to recover the intimacy of handmaking. She travels to Jordan’s Badia (desert), where she engages in Bedouin women’s craftsmanship of textile weaving and tent making.
Seikaly is the co-founder of Amman Design Week (ADW) and the founder of ālmamar, a cultural experience and residency program in Amman, Jordan. She was appointed as the Louis I Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale School of Architecture and won the Lexus Design Award for her ongoing work, Weaving a Home.
Her works have been exhibited at many institutions: Science Museum, London (2022); Darat Al Funun, Amman (2022); The Miyake Issey Foundation, Tokyo (2021); Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Madrid (2020); MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (2018); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017); and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (2016). Her works are also housed in private and public collections: Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan, Amman, and Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.
