Two Lovers, 2021

Unraveled cotton piping, natural and synthetic dyes

The 210th Night, 2021

Unraveled cotton piping, natural and synthetic dyes

The Lovers of Bassorah, 2022

Unraveled cotton piping, natural and synthetic dyes

“Behind Closed Doors”, is a large scale fabric installation that explores the queer feminine in 1,001 Arabian Nights. Through re-envisioning the text’s submerged queer narratives and foregrounding them visually through large scale fabric sculptures, I visually push back on the narrative of an ahistorical queer Muslim/Arab existence while grounding our historic and contemporary presence in our native cultures. By utilizing delicate materials such as cotton fiber and natural dyes, I explore the precarious presence that the queer Muslim/Arab subject occupies in both the metaphorical East and West and how our existence troubles that imagined binary. My work in both materiality and subject is designed to insist upon presence in the face of enforced absence so that the queer Muslim/Arab subject is not forced to choose among and between mutually exclusive binaries but can have a “home” in the in-between space.