Weaving Words, Stitching Connections: My Journey as an Artist and Curator of the Bisheh Project
I am an artist who works with fabric, photography, and memory. My hands have always been drawn to thread—its delicacy, its strength, its ability to hold stories in silence. My artistic journey began with painting and drawing, but it was through sewing, layering, and embedding fragments of history into cloth that I discovered the language my work had been searching for.
Over the years, I’ve carried with me the weight and gift of displacement. As an immigrant artist, I’ve learned how visibility isn’t given—it is claimed, cultivated, and sometimes fought for quietly, in the solitude of the studio. I’ve also learned that community is not something we simply find—it’s something we build, thread by thread.
This is why I founded Bisheh Project.
Bisheh began not just as a project, but as a response—a letter to the silence we felt around us. My partner and I created it on an evening when we realized we weren’t alone in our invisibility. Many others—artists and art professionals alike—were navigating the same isolation, the same longing for deeper connection in an art world often defined by distance and gatekeeping.
In Bisheh, we invite artists and art professionals to write letters to the art world. Not emails. Not Instagram captions. Letters. Handwritten if possible, heartfelt always. These letters are mailed to our members—physically delivered—because we believe in the intimacy of touch, the patience of paper, and the quiet radical act of being seen through someone’s words. We are not trying to fix the art world. We are trying to humanize it.
As the curator of this project, my role is to listen, to hold space, and to gather these voices into a growing, living archive of care and resistance. I see Bisheh as a field where voices can grow wild, unpolished, and true. Where contributors are not reduced to résumés, but honored as storytellers, thinkers, and witnesses to their time.
This is not just a project. It is a gesture. A call. A soft rebellion stitched in ink and thread.
And I am honored to be its caretaker.
By Negin Mahzoun
