Hiraeth is a Welsh concept of longing for a home which you can never return to, a home that may have never existed. It can be loosely translated as ‘nostalgia’.
As a survivor of a war that destroyed my childhood images, I am drawn to create an archive for myself, my community, and communities yet to come. Further, as an immigrant from Lebanon to Dearborn, I come from an intersection of people that have been looked at and surveilled but not seen. In subject and form, my art practice apprehends the roots and effects of this historical otherness and invisibility.
bell hooks writes that looking “is a site of resistance,” whereas Solmaz Sharif reveals to us that according to the US military’s dictionary, a “look” is when a bomb goes off and kills life. My practice grapples with looking being both resistance and violence and negotiating the tension between visibility, documentation and surveillance. The desire to be seen, and represented, that’s loaded with a fear of being watched. I look for new possibilities of looking by playing across the spectrum of representation and abstraction, subject and object.
Beginning with a lens based inward gaze, my self-portraiture draws upon traditions of photography in the intimate domestic space and destabilizes them by challenging notions of weaponized masculinities. Instead by composing tenderness through the trans-masculine photographic subject, I create a positive and humanized depiction. In Construction of the Savage (2017-), I refocus the audience’s gaze by adding modes of abstraction and sculptural barriers to the photograph. Simultaneously giving and withholding visual access to create complex landscapes that transform how one may feel while looking at a photograph. It is not what we are looking at. It is how we look at it.
In my community portrait and interview series, Muslims in North America (2019-), I live with my sitter for a predetermined period of time and document them within their intimate domestic space. In pursuit of a new paradigm of image-making, I renegotiate the relationship between photographer, subject, and audience. My "subjects" are my collaborators. My interest lies in what we are looking at and challenges the position of the gaze.
This approach toward self-portraiture extends to my curatorial and social practice. My experimental site, Habibi House (2017-) transforms the home into a gallery, residency, community garden, and mutual aid space for a radical social practice that gives agency to the visiting artists and surrounding communities themselves. In my co-curatorial series A Real Arab Blueprint (2020-2022), we gave artists and communities the opportunity to define themselves while extending the private gallery out into public space.
Ultimately, my practice is rooted in my connection to an inclusive diasporic community, where joy becomes resistance. It is this commitment that opens my work to unknown possibilities where I explore and challenge structures of power and naturalization as they manifest within bodies, built environments, and communities. I often return to Galeano’s sentiment of being nostalgic for a country which does not exist on a map. For myself, I am nostalgic for a body I have yet to inhabit; of feeling rooted, but my roots are up in the air.