This series of appliqué tapestries was created in 2022 for a solo exhibition at Bread and Salt San Diego.

Each piece blends together imagery inspired from real pharaonic styled tourist tapestries purchased when visiting my family in Egypt that have hung in my parents house since my infancy. I would often pretend I was the pharaoh on the hunt, or sitting in my thrown, as the daily interaction and reminder I had that I was Egyptian before 9/11 were the tourist trinkets and decorations my mother and father had placed sporadically thought the house, alongside my others quilts, typical midwestern decoration and other Americana accents.

Growing up in Indiana, I had a typical midwestern upbringing of my time. Boredom, cornfields, participation in 4-h fairs every summer and wandering around the quiet streets unsupervised for hours as a child with my bike. My father would splice in his Egyptian culture for myself and my siblings, intrinsically intertwined with the flat, polite and passive aggressive midwestern lifestyle through music, language religious teachings, cultural behavior and even the boogie men, “Abu Rigleh Masloukha” and “Frakeeko Lettalonly” Who live in the pine trees at the edges of our yard and would attack us if we came home too late or misbehaved. Only to learn, as I got older, that the real boogie men are often indistinguishable from from an average person and will attack you for any reason they choose.

“When straddling the liminal space between layered identities, making a home within the liminal "middle" space is the alternative answer to falling off the margins into obscurity. Through independent series of works that traverse historical, pop-cultural, religious and autobiographical topics investigating various aspects of her identity, Yasmine K. Kasem makes sense of all that she is through unraveling her identity as Arab, Queer, Muslim and midwestern transplant and how it complicates her understanding of herself. This exhibition features 4 series of works exploring the threads and tensions that exist between identity and her ongoing prerogative to create a space that feels like home.” - show statement from Bread and Salt