Statement

Multi-diciplinary Artist creating works that focus on the perception of identity, navigating hybridity, reflections of personal history and remarks on social stigma.

I explore the inherent tension between presence and absence through the use of liminal materials such as cotton, thread, and natural dyes. As a queer Muslim Egyptian woman, I am intimately familiar with inbetweeness and use my artistic practice to give shape to queer Muslim/Arab existence and desire and unraveling to understand my lived experience as such. By utilizing delicate materials such as cotton fiber and natural dyes, I explore the precarious presence in layered identity and how existence troubles imagined binaries. My work in both materiality and subject is designed to insist upon presence in the face of enforced absence. Using Hybridity and liminality to disrupt mutually exclusive binaries and broaden the in-between space.

 I am Interested in the intersections of what it means to be American, Muslim, Queer, and Egyptian as a woman. I am working between the conflicting layers of each identity and meshing them into one to create a space for myself and materialize my perceptions of heritage, gender, religion and sexuality. I create work that confronts misconceptions through formal and gestural works. Allowing the emotional strain that develops within the layers to speak and the space I inhabit to surface.  Recent works are exploring identity through grief and its force of reconciliation of potentially conflicting attributes of gender, religion and sexuality within an individual. 

Info

San Diego