The Quilt Project - قورمه جلغهی نو
A Collaboration between The 525, Hailey Weber, and 30 Birds Foundation
Nuit Blanche
Saturday, September 20th, 2025
Closing Reception:
Friday, September 26th, 2025
6:00PM - Late
River Centre Promenade
355 2nd Ave S
Saskatoon, SK , Treaty 6
Due to this project's incredible support from the community, we are now able to make the reception free of charge. We would love for you to join us in celebration.
The 525 is proud to present the documentation of our ongoing Quilt Project - قورمه جلغهی نو, lead by artist and 525 member, Hailey Weber, in conjunction with the 30 Birds Foundation.
This collaborative textile installation will consist of a large-scale quilt that will be created by women community members from 30 Birds Foundation, notably the WINGSPAN Ambassadors, alongside lead artist, Hailey Weber. Over three workshops, participants learned the practice of soak-stain painting on canvas—creating the patches which will be stitched together by artist Hailey Weber into the final artwork: a massive quilt displayed on a custom-built structure.
The quilting practice has prevailed through centuries of constant change, and has an expansive history in Afghan cultures. Considered a historically matriarchal practice, quilting inspires a feminist approach to collaborative art making. Through great labour and many hands working together, these abstract patches form a language of togetherness through a variety of lived experiences. Representing not only comfort and the idea of “home”—the quilt embodies memory, tradition, sustainability, and belonging.
The 30 Birds Foundation is a national charity that builds pathways for Afghan girls and women to learn, lead, and live freely in Canada. Through our flagship WINGSPAN program, we provide a circle of support that includes mentorship, leadership summits, and educational scholarships to help our members achieve their full potential. Projects like this, in collaboration with our partners at The 525, are at the heart of our mission to empower young women to share their own powerful stories of resilience, identity, and hope.
Listen to exhibition playlists curated by Hannah Scheu
The Quilt Project (قورمه جلغهی نو): Celebrating Community Playlist
Exhibition Statement
The Quilt Project قورمه جلغهی نو brings together Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain painting method with quilting traditions from both Canada and Afghanistan through the 30 Birds Foundation. Working together, lead artist Hailey Weber, 30 Birds artists, and Saskatoon-based emerging women artists reimagine abstraction not as the product of a solitary “genius” painter, but as a collective practice rooted in care, storytelling, and feminist resistance.
Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain process, pouring thinned paint directly onto raw canvas, was groundbreaking in the 1950s. By dissolving the boundaries between pigment and surface, her method challenged the dominance of the brushstroke and emphasized process over product. Though often written into male-centered art histories, this technique was a woman’s invention, one that quietly undermined hierarchies of control and authorship. The Quilt Project قورمه جلغهی نو expands Frankenthaler’s radical gesture into a monumental quilt, reclaiming her legacy in a participatory format that resists erasure and elevates collaboration.
Quilting has long been a medium of community-making and subtle politics. In Canada, quilting bees evolved beyond domestic craft to support social change. Early 20th-century suffrage quilts carried signatures and slogans, functioning as mobile petitions when women were excluded from formal politics. During the Second World War, Canadian women created hundreds of thousands of quilts for relief efforts, embedding communal strength in every stitch. These gatherings and people coming together to quilt in domestic spaces provided a place for friendship, mutual support, and joy.
In Afghanistan, quilting circles have served a parallel role, particularly under regimes that restricted women’s freedom. When public gathering was banned, women met in private to sew. Patterns often carried coded critiques of state control or news from relatives abroad, transforming textiles into hidden texts of survival and resistance. These quilting practices preserved cultural memory, created discreet networks of solidarity, and asserted women’s voices.
By connecting Afghan and Canadian quilting lineages, The Quilt Project قورمه جلغهی نو creates a living archive of feminist practice. Women gathering to pour paint, cut fabric, stitch, and share stories continue a tradition that is both social and political. Each gesture, whether it is a brush of pigment, a seam of fabric, or a moment of laughter, becomes an act of care and empowerment. Crucially, this space of shared joy gave the artists freedom to explore the full spectrum of their identities, rather than performing a monolithic narrative of ‘Afghanhood’ so often tied to pain and trauma.
Hanging above and around the viewer, it reverses the authoritative verticality of the traditional gallery painting. This orientation offers a tender, protective space that resonates with the ways Afghan quilts often serve as literal and symbolic forms of shelter. The work thus becomes both a visual field and a metaphorical refuge, acknowledging the resilience of the 30 Birds girls and women while inviting broader audiences to stand within that strength. The work becomes an immersive site where Canadian and Afghan feminist histories converge, not as parallel narratives, but as interwoven threads in a shared fabric of resistance and care.
Audio Curator's Statement
The vision of the Quilt Project پروژه لحاف is rooted in collaboration and storytelling. Built in partnership with artist Hailey Weber and the 30 Birds Foundation, this project uses art to give voice to the experiences of resilient immigrant women and girls.
The stories of each participant in the making of this artwork are embedded in the fabric; each piece an extension of their personhood. Each individual’s canvas is sewn to their community, both metaphorically and physically. This piece is a celebration of overcoming adversity, building community, and embracing individuality. The music within these playlists was sourced in collaboration with Maliha Kazimi, an Afghani immigrant from Parvan Province, who spent the majority of her young life in Kabul. She now resides in Canada, studying Public Administration at the University of Saskatchewan. Maliha graciously shared some of her favourite songs and artists with me, providing me a starting point for curating this body of music. The songs she gifted me are full of life and energy, just like her.
Maliha, reflecting on the impact music has had on her over the course of her young life, describes songs from her youth filling her home with ‘excitement and a true sense of renewal’. Songs used in celebrations of Eid, New Years, birthdays, and cultural celebrations became her refuge- the bridge between her past and present lives. She states, ‘When you move to a new country, one of the most painful experiences is losing connection with the things that bring you a sense of belonging and joy. Listening to nostalgic music helps me feel closer to the life I left behind, my roots’. Maliha’s chosen songs connect us all as listeners to the sense of strength and resilience she feels while listening and reflecting, a practice good for the soul.
The songs within this playlist span many Central Asian countries and include a wide variety of genres. Each track in one way or another uses maqam, an age-old melodic system that gives Arabic music and adjacent genres their signature feel and movement. Siren-like vocals and powerful string instruments including the oud and qanun (Arabic string instruments ranging from 11-81 strings), melt into one another song by song, covering a range of emotions in their tone. Emotional expression is encouraged and celebrated within these genres, referred to as tarab. Some songs are representative of loss and adversity, while others are powerful, loud celebrations of perseverance, community, and humanism. The inclusion of a wide range of energies, artists, and emotions is representative of the spectrum of feelings resulting from life altering changes like starting anew in Canada.
Blending culturally significant style and technique with the disco, RnB, and modern pop roots that have built The 525’s auditory brand has been an incredibly meaningful experience. Engaging in Central Asian culture by intentionally listening to their auditory art and lyricism has heavily impacted all of us at The 525; contributing to who we are as an organization and underscoring who we seek to empower with our exhibitions.
I extend my sincere thanks to Maliha for her guidance in listening, and I encourage our guests to join us in the ancient practice of embracing and celebrating one another, and ourselves, through music.
With gratitude,
Hannah Scheu, Audio Curator with The 525