Presented by PLAYGROUND DETROIT, Casting The Net is fine artist and metalsmith, Zahra Almajidi’s debut solo exhibition that flows between the spaces of constructed memory and contradictory materiality.
Employing both analog and digital fabrication methods, her design objects, jewelry, and digital prints envision a future that asks: How does one build upon the craft and design traditions of their ancestors to forge a connection to their displaced culture?
Presented by PLAYGROUND DETROIT, Casting The Net. is fine artist and metalsmith, Zahra Almajidi’s debut solo exhibition that flows between the spaces of constructed memory and contradictory materiality. Employing both analog and digital fabrication methods, her design objects, jewelry, and digital prints envision a future that asks: How does one build upon the craft and design traditions of their ancestors to forge a connection to their displaced culture?
At its core, Almajidi’s body of work investigates the following:
How do we build upon the craft traditions of our ancestors? How do we in the diaspora effectively look towards a future, while still holding space for a culture that has been prevented from organically moving into the 21st century?
How do one reckon with the imposed destruction of the ecosystem and material conditions of a culture that has existed for 5000 years? How do we immortalize our existences through objects whose origins we can only sense, whose histories are fragmented yet persist in collective memory?
Above all- how does one’s crafted objects challenge the conditions of loss to reassert presence through material and form?
These questions manifest into a colorful, figurative and ornamental visual language that transforms space into a site of confrontation. Adorned with design objects inspired by the imagery in the Marsh Arab rugs and other cultural objects, the exhibition functions as a speculative act of world-building instead of focusing on a past systematically erased.
Instead, “Casting The Net” insists on projecting into a future that both references and expands upon a dying craft and material culture.
RSVP TO OPENING: DESIGN CORE DETROIT
On view through October 3, 2026 at PLAYGROUND DETROIT.
ABOUT ZAHRA ALMAJIDI
Zahra Almajidi is a visual artist raised and based in Detroit, Michigan. Her work explores the ways in which objects and adornment allow displaced people to continue to uphold and practice their craft traditions while living in the diaspora.
She is a 2025 Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient, powered by Gilbert Family Foundation.
