DIG 2025: Asim Abdulaziz - 1941 (Yemen)

As part of Tramway's Dance International Glasgow festival, 9 - 24 May,  our gallery programme presents Asim Abdulaziz - 1941 (2021), a short experimental film directed and produced by the Yemeni artist. An eloquent and compelling meditation on war,and the disorientation and alienation experienced by Yemenis. 

Screened on a loop in our front gallery (T5) at the following times:

Sat 17 May | 12 – 7.30pm
Sun 18 May | 12 – 5pm   
(CLOSED Mon)
Tue 22 May | 5.30 - 7.30pm
Wed 21 May | 12 – 7.30pm
Thu 22 May | 12 – 5pm
Fri 23 May | 12 - 5pm
Sat 24 | 12 – 6pm
Sun 25 | 12 – 5pm

Running time, 4 mins 43

ACCESS
Highly visual.
Relaxed screenings, audiences can come and go as they please.

After learning that knitting was a significant way for women in the United States to participate in the war effort during World War II, Abdulaziz was struck by how, in contemporary Yemen, knitting as an act of solidarity in a time of war would seem entirely absurd. The repetitive nature of the hand movement guiding the needles and stitching the wool thread distracts one from pondering the past and future, locking the knitter into a timeless present. By staging the practice in Yemen, Abdulaziz draws an embodied metaphor around the quotidian experience of war—captive to the logic of survival—that inhibits projecting oneself into a future of self-realization. Moreover, in a gender role reversal that further accentuates the strangeness of implementing this action in Yemen, the artist cast ten men of different generations and filmed them knitting with red wool inside one of Aden’s historical landmarks: a Hindu temple long abandoned to decay. He disrobed them—the men are shirtless, itself a provocative gesture in Yemen, which underlines the act’s absurdity. 1941 is an eloquent and compelling poetic meditation on war’s prohibition of claiming agency over time and self.

About the artist

Asim Abdulaziz is a Yemeni filmmaker, visual artist, and producer. In 2021, Asim directed his first short film 1941, which was exhibited at the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2022 and at the VA Museum in London in 2023. Asim served as the art director of the first Yemeni feature film to be selected at the Berlinale Film Festival 2023, The Burdened (2023). His work has also been featured in The Washington Post, ArtNews, i-D, and Hypebeast. Asim has been awarded various grants, including an AFAC Artist Support Grant in 2020, which helped him develop his photography project Homesick, and the 2021 Masarat grant from the British Council for his first experimental short film, 1941, as well as a Comra Academy grant for development for his current short film I Broke a Vase.

Header image: 1941 film still, Asim Abdulaziz, 1941, 2021, video, color, sound, 4’43”, video still © Asim Abdulaziz