Biography
Mary Hazboun is a multidisciplinary Chicago-based artist who practices “ The Art of Weeping” as an act of processing grief and somatic healing of bodies through drawing and singing. Mary’s work highlights the nuanced traumas of women and their resistance against different forms of oppression that is manifested in the military machine, patriarchal societies, and forced migrations. She uses art, ceremonies, and performance for emptying blocked emotions, opening internal space, and pouring in trauma-informed introspections as a form of healing. Mary was born and raised in the city of Bethlehem and moved to the U.S in 2004.
Mary’s Background
The Art of Weeping” collection came to life in 2017 when I started doodling in class to ease the flashbacks I was experiencing when reading course materials that discussed military and gender violence. For example, courses such as Women, War, and Resistance, presented me with challenging reading and visual material to process, yet helped me in ways that made some traumas surface, and made me face them. I had to watch my inner responses and become more aware, so I could make sense of both my past and present reality. I had to navigate through my traumatic experiences and record them with images. Months later, doodles turned into sketches, and as a result, a collection of over forty art pieces came to life. I am healing when I draw; art heals me in ways I don’t completely understand.
My sketches have a narrative feature which connects the personal with the political: the retelling of having witnessed and experienced these events. The empty backgrounds direct the viewers’ attention to the figures that are constrained within a military-occupied space. The barbed wire, the tanks, and the smoke reflect the daily reality of war. The viewer must study the body language and facial expressions in order to gain insight into the bodies’ subjectivity. The viewers gain an idea of what it means to live in a militarized zone and the resistance within bodies. In addition, I have art pieces that explore the systematic gendered violence imposed by familial, cultural, and religious institutions. So, in many ways, the viewers who see my art can relate and connect to these images depending on their location, both their personal and collective histories.
In my work, I aim to make the trauma/s visible. The cramped postures are due to physical, mental, and emotional restraints, in which some of these bodies appear deformed, paralyzed, and/or frozen in time. The bodies are drawn in a black marker, and I intentionally do not add color because black sets a particular mood of subtle mourning and the endurance of these bodies, how they take up occupied space, and how they experience their lives. My artwork conveys aspects of the systematic nature of oppression and how it is molded to be invisible.
In my practice of drawing, I am learning that home starts here in my body, in all that lies embedded beneath my skin. Claiming my body as the center, I map the nature of my conflicts, and I bear witness to what my body remembers through images. The journey inward to find home is what this project has been about.