chronicles
Makers of beauty
Country: Kenya
Date: 2025
Photography
art project
on grief
Country: Belgium
Date: 2025
Photography/Self-portraits
i will build a living, breathing memorial to Cindy Sherman.
Sherman
gave me language before I had lived enough to know what I’d need it
for. That language returned to me through the smoke and silence of
grief. Like their work, grief, I came to understand, is a character. A
shape-shifter. A performance. You don’t always feel it when it first
arrives—you learn to act it, to put on its face. You stage it for
others. In the theatre of mourning, you become the main character, where
the lighting is always off balance and the audience doesn’t clap.
Sherman’s photographs—so often misread as self-portraits—are, in fact, portraits of the masks we wear to be believed.
isn’t grief just that?
The
mask you and I try on in the mirror before stepping out into the world?
A performance requested by the unknown crowd, to be performed just
right, or else…I do not cry. I wear grief. I dress it. I cast it. I
become it. I smear eyeliner that never fully runs. I sit in poses too
composed to be accidental. It's not realism that I want — it's
recognition. Because grief is performative not in the sense of faking,
but in that of ritual. It is costume and choreography.
An
inheritance we enact. Some griefs I’ve lived. Others, I’ve absorbed from
stories, from the shapes of people I've loved, from collective mourning
gifted to me like an heirloom. Maybe the truest version of something we
know too well to name.Two decades later, my mind remains haunted by her, the woman looking back in some of her stills. Not crying—but almost. Not broken—but almost. Two decades later, my mind remains haunted by her, the woman looking back in some of her stills. Not crying—but almost. Not broken—but almost.
A
woman on the brink of something—loss, realization, abandonment. Each
photograph could be a study in pre-grief, in something like the
suspended possibility of rupture. A vibration so high, a muffled scream
of something unknown.Grief as performance. Grief as cinema. Grief as
drag. Grief as self-portrait.
art project
how will you break?
Country: Tunisia
Date: 2024
Part of a painting series on loss and identity.
Acrylic and oil on canvas.
art project
i will breathe
Country: UAE
Date: 2024
Photography
research
carnets de route: le corps brisé
Date: 2024-2025
chronicles
someone else’s tale episode 1
Country: Kenya
Date: 2025
Videography/Mini-Documentary
Episode 1: Art in Exile
first episode of a series entitled The Artist's Tale.
The
series is both poetry and documentary, where artists's stories and work
are showcased. This first episode follows three renowned Sudanese
artists, Dr. Abdelrahman Shangal, Mr. Baharaddin Adam, and Mr. Yassir
Ali - who welcomed me into their Nairobi studio and in one of their
joint exhibitions.