VCUQatar Presents ‘Trifold’

The exhibition took place on Wednesday 25 September at the Saffron Hall at VCUQatar. The pieces will continue to be displayed in the exhibition spaces in the VCUQatar corridors until 10 October 2013.

The idea for the Trifold exhibition came about when VCUQatar graphic design alumna Haneen Al Shareef came across a piece of modular origami on the desk of a security woman at VCUQatar. Al Shareef, who is a graphic designer at VCUQatar’s Center for Research, Design and Entrepreneurship, was intrigued by the pieces as more of them appeared around Education City.

Al Shareef found out that six security women, who help maintain safety and security on the Education City campus by day and sometimes by night, make modular origami in their free time, a craft they taught themselves. They collect waste paper and recycle it into unique one-off paper sculptures. Their beautiful creations come from a process of imagination and experimentation.

Modular origami is a more complex form of paper-folding, where multiple pieces of paper are folded into identical modules (in this case a triangle, hence the name Trifold) and joined together in a construction that would be impossible to achieve with just one piece of paper.

Al Shareef collaborated with Dana A Ahdab, assistant professor of graphic design at VCUQatar and Hadeer Omar, VCUQatar alumna and graphic designer at VCUQatar’s Research Center, and decided to host an exhibition at VCUQatar, which they jointly curated. “The objective of this exhibition”, say the curators, “is to value the talent of these security women and encourage and motivate them. We would also like to help them develop their skills further and shed more light on this craft.”

The works on display have been created by Gemma Dela Rosa, Joy Tolledo, Anita Nicholas (all VCUQatar security); Jennifer Raballo (Recreation Center security); Rowena Manatala (Qatar Academy security),Yvonne Banes (Student Center security) and MA. Kristel Mallari. The pieces are for sale.

Works from ‘Trifold’, an exhibition by the female security staff at Education City, will be on display at the exhibition spaces at VCUQatar until 10 October, 2013. All the pieces are for sale.