School of Art, Design and Media (ADM)

Profile

I am an artist who has exhibited widely here and abroad including at the Impressions Gallery, NMPFT Museum in Bradford and Mois de La Photo in Montreal.  I have an MA from the Slade School of Art in Fine Art and my practice has progressed into a multi-disciplinary approach combining photography, creative writing and oral history methods.  I have a broad experience of fine art and collaborative projects as well as community arts.

My practice deals with issues of identity, migration and memory within a post-colonial context relating to my middle-eastern background.

Current and Forthcoming Research

1. The World in London
   Portrait Commission for Olympics 2012 from the Photographers Gallery and Gulbenkian Foundation
   2012 (date to be confirmed)
2. Ottoman Pasts, Present Cities: Cosmopolitanism, memory, identity
   Visual Advisor for AHRC Networking application for conference, workshops, exhibition, catalogue and website
   2012-13 (date to be confirmed)
3. The UCL Migration and Settlement Film Festival
   Slide-shows of several of my photo-text series will be included in the screenings
   15 February 2012
4. Family Ties Conference: Recollection and Representation
   Paper about ‘The City that Exploded Slowly. Interdisciplinary conference organised by Dr. Katia Pizzi and Dr. Sally Waterman at the IGRS centre, University of London
   8/9 March 2012
5. Solo Exhibition at the Tubke Gallery, Istanbul
   September 2012
6. The Many Portraits of …
   On-going CAAD funded project

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The World in London

This is a large-scale, public portraiture project timed to coincide with the 2012 Olympic Games in London and it will be featured on billboards all over London. The project 'The World in London' aims to celebrate the diversity of London's population and of photographic portraiture and is supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. An exhibition of the work is planned for the Gulbenkian Gallery in Hoxton as well as a permanent display at a major institution in London.

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Ottoman Pasts, Present Cities: Cosmopolitanism, memory, identity

I am the visual advisor for this project and with my colleagues, we are applying for funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), for a Networking Scheme. They are Dr. Jay Prosser (University of Leeds), Dr. Gabriel Koureas (University of London, Birkbeck) and Colette Wilson (Visiting Research Fellow, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London).

The interdisciplinary workshops are intended to be focused and creative sessions exploring different aspects of the Ottoman city and its legacy from a variety of different perspectives and methodologies: historical, memorialist, socio-political, autobiographical, archaeological, imperialist-colonial-postcolonial. The workshops will lead to an international conference with an accompanying photographic exhibition in London and a co-edited volume of essays.

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The UCL Migration and Settlement Film Festival

The UCL Migration and Settlement Film Festival focuses on the position of migrants in the built environment and the impact they have on their physical, social, cultural and economic environment. The aim of the event is to create an opportunity for an interdisciplinary dialogue on the questions that the films raise.

There will be a slide-show of a selection of my work plus I will be participating in a panel discussion.

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Family Ties Conference: Recollection and Representation

An interdisciplinary conference exploring the representation and role of family memories in autobiographical writing, photography and artist’s film and video. I will be giving a paper about ‘The City that Exploded Slowly’. This photo-text series is an attempt to map out a personal ‘archaeology’ through a dispersed history encompassing the Lebanese civil war from 1975 to 1991, its aftermath and the many return trips, which have punctuated my life since then. A parallel is drawn between a personal tale and the many transformations of Beirut from a magical and chaotic place to a war-torn no man’s land to finally become a sanitised space colonised by global brands.

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Solo Exhibition at the Tubke Gallery, Istanbul

A selection from the series Where Do Swans Come From? will be shown.

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The Many Portraits of …

Starting from the idea of the self as being in a state of flux, my approach in this project would be based on a repeated capture of a subject over many months to be able to record the ebb and flow registered on the face, gaze and posture and the face here is seen as the main discloser to others. A key text in my research was the book ‘About Face’ by the clinical neurophysiologist Jonathan Cole. In it, he states that the development of the face took place in parallel with the evolution of complex inner states and that people’s minds and feelings are ‘made flesh’ in the face which is the key displayer of signals.