Yara Abu Aataya
Born in Gaza, she has lived in Prague since she was two months old, where she studied architecture at the Academy of Arts Design and Architecture. There she also tried her hand at other disciplines such as bookbinding, typography, screen printing, lithography and offset. Thus, she approaches her work in a complex and multidisciplinary way.
The designer Yara Abu Aataya first encountered Czech glass while working for Czech glass shops and at the Pragl Glass centre on Old Town Square in Prague.
Already during her studies in architecture and her experiments with various techniques and materials, glass was one of her desired professional metas. It evokes fragility, but at the same time it can be surprisingly unyielding; it combines Czech history, tradition and the present, when Czech glass is still at its peak and domestic glass masters are globally sought-after craftsmen. The opportunity to finally work with this material came to her in 2022, when she met Shard Art Studio, which gives designers the opportunity to realize their dream projects. ~1 hour combines a love for Czech craft, design and work with the identity of the artist, which is made up of two completely different realities.
About the objects
Hourglass collection
The unique hourglass was created by the designer using technology she developed with Shard Art. It is not a single piece, but two interconnected units that communicate duality symbolically and through colour – a theme that permeates the entire ~1 hour collection.
Each colour represents half an hour, and together they make up the whole one hour we should devote to ourselves every day. At the same time, the two pieces combined into one point to the Arab identity of the designer living in the Czech Republic and her roots are reflected in each piece of the collection.
She combines her love for the Czech glass craft with glimpses of her childhood and adolescence. The sand is an integral part of the hourglass and evokes the endless dunes of places that bring the artist back to her roots and also give meaning to time as a fluid phenomenon. Where else but in the endless desert can we feel how relative time is, to which in today’s hectic times we subordinate everything without a moment’s rest? Let’s change that, let’s break the linear flow of time for at least an hour and steal a moment for ourselves.
Vases
The vases from the ~1 hour collection were created from hourglass test pieces and prove that creative mistakes in the creative process can have a life and story of their own, just as our mistakes become part of our story, moving us and creating us.
Each piece is unique with its own defects that become assets for their uniqueness and uniqueness. Each vase can also be seen as a symbol of the interruption of the passage of time, an act of defiance against the system that forces us to wage a relentless battle with time.
