I began a series of contemporary miniature paintings and large installations chronicling the events unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa region and their representation in Western media in 2012 following the onset of the 'Arab Spring.'
Our digital landscape puts us in contact with a sea of fragmented and stratified documentations that come forth on social media platforms filtered by chance as well as by multiple, calculated and unknowable internal dialectics and interests.
My work samples and combines imagery and information from this multitude of raw-footage, photographs and documentary snippets, as well as from traditional media outlets, reflecting both a fragmented understanding of these accounts and the conscious and unconscious attempts to recompose a potential reality.
Over the last years, I have followed this project to live in the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Italy, bringing to my work a research background in Timurid, Safavid and Ottoman miniature painting in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum Department of Islamic Arts archives in New York, the Topkapi Palace Library in Istanbul, the University of Istanbul Nadir Eserler Library and the Museum of Art at Bowdoin College’s Islamic Manuscript Collection.
Permanent collections of Portland Museum of Art and Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. Exhibitions with Jamjar Gallery, Real Art Ways; SPACE Gallery; the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; the Center for Maine Contemporary Art; and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine. I have taught tempera technique at Zayed University in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and worked as a art instructor for displaced Syrian children at Small Projects Istanbul. My writing has appeared in publications including CHAIN magazine, Circumference: Journal of Translation, Bombay Gin and the Berkshire Review.
Viewing a Khamsa of Nizami manscript at the Metropolitan Museum of Art archive.
