عن About

I was born in Jordan to an Iraqi father and grew up between two places that were never quite both home. My father lived mostly in Iraq. London became a third place — where my grandparents and cousins are, and where I now study. I’ve always been in the gap between somewhere, and the work I make is about that gap.

The work is mixed media — digital photography and Photoshop, sometimes block ink, sometimes plaster gauze, often Arabic calligraphy layered into the image. I work with my own photographs, family photos, scanned letters from my childhood, passport stamps. Arabic typography isn’t decoration in the work — it’s structural, the way the Arabic side of me is structural. I rarely translate it. If a viewer doesn’t know what it says, that’s also true to the experience.

What I keep returning to is memory and inheritance — what gets passed down between generations, what music or a smell or a phrase can carry that nothing else can, what it feels like to be made of places you no longer fully live in. I’m interested in how identity holds together when it’s stitched from many places, but none to call one’s own.

The work earned a 5 on the AP Art & Design portfolio, but mostly I make it because I have to.