Pigeons, a common name for gray doves, symbolizes peace. They often roam urban epicenters and make home wherever they land. The resilience of their spirit is often overlooked because we see them often. Dina Nazmi Khorchid’s textile and installation work draws from the metaphor of the pigeon to talk about her migration story.
Khorchid is like what surrealistic blues poet aja monet calls “born of distance between now and then” as the sediments of inherited trauma and migratory patterns influence Khorchid. She migrated from Lebanon to the United Arab Emirates then Lebanon, again, and then the United States. While her story is deeply personal, it connects to a broader narrative of her Palestinian culture. I wish we did not have to admire her for her strength because strength is a burden. Her vulnerability is on display through her recent pigeon series.
Pigeons started appearing in her work as a child. It is associated with a sentimental memory of her father. As a daughter of a ‘missing war casualty and artist,’ she writes, “I inherited from my father a Lebanese travel document for Palestinian refugees and a letter he had sent his family before his abduction and disappearance in the Gulf War. This letter became a cornerstone in my journey into art making and the creation of a metaphor — a pigeon — that appears and disappears throughout my work… Translated from Arabic, he said, ‘Dina (3 years old) is growing up and becoming more mature every day, she has the tongue and intellect of an adult. Just yesterday, she was drawing a pigeon or a dove followed by other drawings for the family.’” She returns to this symbol as an adult and extracts how it was her adolescent way of drawing a pigeon was in lieu of tending to wound without a scar. The pigeons in her work are an ethereal and haunting symbol that becomes one of flight from country to country, the destabilized notion of home and an interweaving of the poetics of transnationalism.