In the Five Stages of Grief series, Awartani uses the threads of talismanic references drawn from the Ottoman Empire and rooted in Islam to make connections to lost elements of Saudi heritage. The artist first encountered talismanic shirts in the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul – pieces which were once said to protect the Sultans as they wore these kaftans before going to war and their wives during childbirth. The artist has taken original textiles from the Thageef tribe in Saudi, coded patterns which once denoted where a tribe came from. During the founding years of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, all such colourful and distinctive costumes were banished, with the neutral and harmonised black abaya and white kaftan encouraged for men and women, as a way of unifying the tribes. Stitched to the original garments are Awartani’s signature magic squares, where she has taken the five stages of grief and applied one stage to each garment. The artist has referenced the ancient system used in divination whereby the letters of the ‘abjad’ are divided into four parts and the seven letters in each part are assigned to one of the elements – air, fire, water, and earth. Here she has created her own coded interpretation by attributing one of the elements to a specific stage of grief, with the last being a combination of all the elements, as these garments are intended to be seen as an aid to overcome the various emotions in the process of grieving. In this work, each symbol or letter of the language she has built is stitched into the cloth, the knots and ties intended as a reference to the sorrow implicit when layers of history are wiped out in the name of modernization. At the same time, the juxtaposition of old and new binds Awartani’s own complex reading of the world around her onto the ancient artifacts.