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Liane Al Ghusain 🇵🇸🇰🇼 ليان الغصين

@lianeya

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Kuwait📍Detroit
@nyuadmfa ‘23
@stanford English grad ‘10
Let there be life #freepalesti̇ne

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Baby’s first conference 🥹

This child-centered conversation serves as a gathering place to discuss joys and challenges of bringing creative practice to parenting and/or caregiving. With an activity to keep everyone’s hands busy, this facilitated conversation embraces creative strategies, the value of “loose parts” play and material prompts to foster connections. Featuring @bandhu_gardens @dirtmadethis @lianeya and their lil studio mates.

Open to ALL MdW: DETROIT attendees.
Children, babies and child-free folx very welcome to attend!

Presented by
@byrnenate & @sometimes__space taken in Detroit, Michigan by @lianeya

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a month ago

Words can’t express how magical our time in Detroit was!

Our stop began at @27thletterbooks , where readers gathered with @djinnabad , @lianeya, @j7md and @fattooshe for an evening of conversation that wandered through folklore, memory, spirituality, and the enduring power of storytelling. As a recurring theme of this tour, the room became a space where people connected the stories of Jerusalem’s jinn to their own cultural traditions, family histories, and encounters with the unseen. Our heartfelt thanks to Drew and the entire @27thletterbooks crew for welcoming us so generously and creating such a thoughtful space for these conversations to unfold.

The journey culminated at Mother of Pearl Studio @motherofpearl.design with a beautiful garden gathering marking the launch of The Fiction Council mural. As the new moon emerged and the night settled into its darkest hour, friends old and new gathered around a bonfire to share jinn stories, food, laughter, and reflections beneath the stars. Painted by the talented @sultansignco , the mural features TFC’s iconic Sadaniel سدن إيل—a guardian carrying a book in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, symbolizing the literary and artistic tools through which stories are preserved, renewed, and carried into the future. For one evening, it felt as though the jinn of Jerusalem had found a home in Detroit.

Our deepest thanks to Bree, Kevin, and the entire Mother of Pearl Studio community for their warmth, generosity, and care throughout our stay. Detroit embraced us with extraordinary hospitality, and we leave feeling grateful for every conversation, every story shared, and every new connection made.

As we continue with our tour along the East Coast, we carry Detroit’s spirit with us.

@djinnabad, @fattooshe, and @j7md continue their journey across the U.S. for readings, conversations, and performances celebrating the launch of the English translation of Hidden Companions: Paranormals from the Old City of Jerusalem. by @lianeya

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a month ago

The next stop is… Detroit!

Join Ahmad Nabil and Liane Al Ghusain at @27thletterbooks on Friday, June 12, for a conversation on belief, the supernatural, and the ways Western skepticism and anthropological methodologies have often marginalized other ways of knowing. In a world where faith is frequently expected to be validated by science, Hidden Companions asks what it means to take stories of the unseen seriously. The testimonies collected in the book can be understood not only as accounts of paranormal encounters, but also as expressions of a collective worldview rooted in Jerusalem’s Old City, its histories, communities, and systems of belief.

Translator Fatema Alhashemi (@fattooshe ) will discuss the process of bringing the book into English, while editor Jenna Hamed (@j7md ) will share insights into publishing the project in the United States.

The event also celebrates the arrival in Detroit of the English translation of Hidden Companions: Paranormals from the Old City of Jerusalem by Ahmad Nabil, translated from the Arabic by Fatema Alhashemi.

Hidden Companions is a collection and archive of supernatural testimonies gathered from residents of Jerusalem’s Old City. Through stories of jinn, tricksters, and paranormal encounters, the book approaches these narratives not merely as folklore, but as living expressions of Palestinian intangible heritage and collective memory.

“Hidden Companions offers a comprehensive testimony of Palestinian magic, power of imagination, and extensive worldbuilding. It archives kaleidoscopic accounts of the realms of the unseen from 1948 to the present day. Enshrined in folk heritage, it presents an intimate and expansive depiction of the spirit world in Palestine.” — Sanabel Abdel Rahman

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event. by @lianeya

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2 months ago

From the 2015 archives of #adelashkanani taken in Kuwait Sea by @lianeya

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3 months ago

I began this embroidery at the beginning of the year, with hope of finding balance as a mother and artist in Trump’s America. The piece came with me to Kuwait, where days into my visit, Trump struck our neighbor Iran. Explosions and implosions, nauseating rollercoaster rides of proclamations and promises, the double speak of “peace talks” and “ceasefires”. Lives and homes lost to this vanity project of constant war. I pray for them. For all our aching hearts. This work evolved to encompass these trying times.

Divine Balance is a tatreez mandala radiating outward from the Islamic invocation هو الله — He is God — through Palestinian embroidery motifs of the cypress, olive branch, amulet, and scales. The composition moves in two directions at once: outward in concentric circles, and upward through the cypress’s vertical reach, long an image in Palestinian visual culture of rootedness and the soul’s longing toward the divine. Its deepest preoccupation is balance — not as stasis, but as the dynamic tension between opposing forces that Taoist philosophy calls the nature of all things: darkness and light, stillness and movement, the earthly and the transcendent, held rather than resolved. The names of God woven within it — يا خافض يارافع — O Lowerer, O Exalter — يا باسط يارافع — O Expander, O Contractor — are themselves a cosmology of equilibrium: four names that move in pairs, each one gaining meaning in relation to its opposite. Shown in Madrid, on the land of Al-Andalus where Islamic geometric art once flourished, the work arrives not as artifact but as active petition — for justice, for witness, for a world that still knows how to hold things in balance. by @lianeya

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3 months ago

I enter my quiet house. Alone at last; time to embroider, to sit in silence, or to be surrounded by the voices of arguing drag queens, unashamed of my trashy taste in television. I put my bags down, tie my hair up, and then notice something that was not there when I left: a little toeprint, the same color as the clay mud at the bottom of the garden.
Rami, my toddler, is here.
But how could he be? I thought his dad was taking him to his grandparents’.
I look closer. An even fainter print; an unmistakable Birkenstock tread. Samir, my husband, is here too. The tracks end at the carpeted stairs. I find them upstairs, curled up together, napping.
I follow the tracks in reverse, back down to the bottom of the garden, as expected. There are cashews crushed underfoot, Rami’s favorite. Mudcakes. Half-buried rubber duckies. A snack; an adventure. The day’s activities are mapped before me, all beginning with that tiny toeprint.
I am mesmerized by tracks all the time. I love the texture snakes leave in the sand, the imprint of deer hooves in the snow, the little muddy pawprints of our cat on my windshield. So I notice whenever animal tracks appear in art.
My most poetic finding is the otter track, found in Anishinaabe beadwork, especially on bandolier bags. In the Ojibwe material I have been reading, otter track appears as one of the oldest and most popular line motifs, often used in borders. The otter’s tail form is described as a diamond paired with an elongated hexagon, based on the track and tail-drag left when the animal crosses ice. Grace Rajnovich writes of the otter’s zigzagging path, explaining that when chased it tries to deceive its enemies by varying its course. Its tracks form a long hexagon between diamonds: the animal rises on its haunches to jump, forming the diamonds, and as it leaps it drags its tail, making the hexagon.

Read more at lianeya.substack.com (link in bio)
This writing was made possible by @centerforcraft Craft research grant by @lianeya

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3 months ago

It was June in Jerusalem, and the tourists came in droves.

I watched them at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, on the Mount of Olives. They brought objects from home — handkerchiefs, passport photos of loved ones, rosaries — and pressed them against the sacred stones of the city, transferring holiness like a transaction. Women knelt and wept at the site where Jesus was said to have been laid out before burial, dragging fabric across the wet rock. Men crouched reverently over the same stone, phone cameras aloft. The emotion was real, undeniably so. The overwhelm was real. What struck me, though, was something else: the cosplay.

I don’t mean that unkindly. But by the time I reached Bethlehem, I could see it clearly — tourists wearing embroidered skullcaps and peasant skirts, draping keffiyehs over their shoulders, layering Palestinian textile motifs over their sport shoes and backpacks. They were dressing for the Biblical imaginary they had come to inhabit. And the souvenir market — the curio shops lining the alleyways of the Old City, the vendors outside every church — was ready for them, selling the costume of a people who were still very much alive and present, just mostly invisible to the pilgrims moving through their streets.

This is not a new phenomenon. It is, in fact, the same phenomenon that has been reshaping Palestinian tatreez for over 150 years. …read more at the Crafting Solidarity Substack (link in bio) taken in بيت لحم - Bethlehem by @lianeya

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4 months ago

I grew up playing on Oriental rugs, lining up toy ponies in their borders before laying my head on their floral centers to stretch out in front of the TV and watch cartoons. Whenever I’ve looked at Diné rugs in my research (specifically pieces from what I now know to be from the Revival Period), I’ve always felt there was something familiar about them. This was actually a big part of the question I’ve set out to answer as a Palestinian: why does our culture feel so aesthetically and philosophically resonant with other indigenous cultures? Is there a link between tatreez and Navajo weaving?

I imagined there was some super subtle but hugely influential trading link, like perhaps there was a Persian cartographer who made it on Lewis & Clark’s devastating colonial expeditions of Turtle Island, and he had a little prayer rug tucked into his travel trunk and left it in the hands of a Native chief, who traded it with a weaving tribe, who then started swooping their lines to be more arabesque—the way origin myths always want a single, fateful encounter to explain everything.

The actual story is much less romantic.

There was a man of Irish origin, known as J. B. Moore, who went deep into Navajo Nation to sell wares to Diné people and to sell their weavings and artworks to everyone else. According to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), John Bradford Moore was a trader of Irish origin who set up the Crystal Trading Post in 1896. Although the outpost was high in the Chuska mountains of what is now New Mexico, he was able to rustle up business by taking a literal page from the Sears & Roebuck catalog—he published two mail-catalogs of Navajo rugs in 1903 and 1911, which “included illustrations of rug designs as well as photographs of Navajo weavers carding wool, spinning wool, and weaving on looms.” The researchers at NMAI note, “though J.B. Moore’s rugs were woven by Navajo artisans many of the patterns were influenced by the popularity of Oriental rug designs at the time.” …read more at the Crafting Solidarity substack (link in bio) taken in Crystal, New Mexico by @lianeya

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4 months ago

I was almost three months pregnant during the making of SENSITIVE CONTENT in October 2023. Watching my people die in scores by the day. Wondering if my rage and sadness was being transferred to my fetus. Unable to look away, afraid to keep looking. I was both blessed and cursed to be at an artist residency. I could record my inner world, process slowly, be fed both physically and psychically by the generous staff and mentors. But no one got it. No one else was from the region. No one else showed up to breakfast with bloodshot eyes from watching story upon story of genocide unfolding, blood red against ash grey. My blood. Out there, running in rivers. My blood, expanding in me, growing eyeballs and a spine. My blood, pounding in my throat, forcing me to write, to perform, to sing, to witness. taken in Atlantic Center for the Arts by @lianeya

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4 months ago

This is part of a performance I did at an artist residency in October 2023 at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. I chose to post it today after seeing the horrifying repetition of history as the Zionist regime rains terrifying flyers over Lebanon. The Dahieh doctrine becomes the Gaza doctrine becomes the Greater Israel Doctrine. God bless the goodness in our souls and bless this region. May all land become holy once more.

Ps. I am aware I have made mistakes in Arabic reading/pronunciation. Now taking applications for Arabic tutor :)

هذا جزء من عرض أدائي قدّمته في إقامة فنية في أكتوبر 2023 في مركز أتلانتيك للفنون. اخترتُ نشره اليوم بعد أن رأيتُ التكرار المروّع للتاريخ، إذ يُمطر النظام الصهيوني لبنانَ بمنشورات مرعبة. تصبح عقيدة الضاحية عقيدةَ غزة، وتصبح عقيدةَ إسرائيل الكبرى. اللهم بارك الخير الذي في أرواحنا، وبارك هذه المنطقة. ليعود كل أرضٍ مقدسةً من جديد.
ملاحظة: أنا أعلم أنني ارتكبتُ أخطاءً في القراءة والنطق بالعربية. أقبل الآن طلبات التقدم لتدريسي العربية 🙂 by @lianeya

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4 months ago

Steadfastly sad and furious, each tapping away at our pocket screens. What if we were a cactus forest? What if we could stand with our arms linked: row upon row of heart-centered beings, strong against the tide of fascism?
What if the rising sun fortified us with rivers of prayers, rays and rays of magical incantations?
An amulet lighting up a temple. A temple made of cacti. Shade created by balance, the masculine and feminine becoming one. This is my prayer.

Temple of Tomorrow
Hand embroidery, cotton yarn, aida cloth, tree branch
2026 | Motifs sourced from @tirazain.initiative taken in The Scarab Club by @lianeya

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5 months ago

🎤 We're honored to welcome our Threads of Resilience keynote speaker: Liane Al Ghusain, a Palestinian-Kuwaiti artist and writer based near Detroit!

Her work explores the emotional and spiritual dimensions of diaspora, utilising video, text, embroidery, performance, and other media to tell stories of displacement, memory, and belonging. Liane has exhibited globally and brings a powerful voice grounded in transnational feminist thought and Palestinian identity.

🎟️ Join us on October 18th in Hamtramck for a day of art, community, and resistance. Your ticket supports mutual aid and legal justice efforts for Palestine, helping us reach our $10K goal for humanitarian relief in Gaza and the West Bank.

📍Venue details sent upon ticket purchase.
🎫 Don’t wait! Get your ticket now & stand in solidarity.

#DearAsianYouth #PalestinianFundraiser #Dearborn #Michigan #FreePalestine #Palestine #MutualAid #FundraiserForGaza #lianealghusain by @lianeya

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9 months ago