My sketches have a narrative feature that 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, the resistance within bodies, and how these meanings can be applied to other militarized zones such as Iraq, Kashmir, Yemen, and Syria. 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 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. This occurs when bodies are situated in spaces caught between multiple forces that collectively restrain and reduce them, where their motion and mobility are restricted, and where life is reduced due to living in a militarized zone, a patriarchal society, or forced to migrate.