I am a Kuwaiti-Iraqi artist and art therapist based in Chicago. My interdisciplinary practice is rooted within photography and expands into video, performance, fiber-materials, and installation. As my material practice grows, my origins in photography influence ways I use materials to sensorily embody and frame concepts I grapple with. My art making process engages personal memories, reflections on present circumstances, and stories of participants/members of my community whose experiences intersect with mine. I balance play, art-based research, and knowledge gathered from my career in somatic-centered art therapy and trauma counseling. All of these components serve as a basis for my studio practice’s process.

My artistic goal has consistently been to bring multiple worlds together, capturing portals and spaces between them. Finding subtle affinities between geologic time, somatic movement, human psyche, gendered trauma, ceremonial music/dance and healing rituals from the Arabian Peninsula. Through relational merging and mapping of human and geological bodies, I vision their liberation. I envision liberation as embodiment of agency, resourcefulness on their own terms, restored and devoid of extraction. By doing so, I examine themes of access, agency, power, the invisibly visible, and potential erosion of socio-cultural conditioning distorting our shared realities.

My current research explores two parallel threads, the renegotiation of trauma within an extracted, trauma-endured body as it moves towards belonging and re-emerges as a liberated body. Liberated from the seizing of autonomic trauma-responses, instead present in its inherent agency. Secondly, I attune to the experience of being desensitized and disembodied from the earth. Reorienting the body towards a reciprocal relationship with the earth. I explore these concepts through my artistic process moderating the somatic and internal tensions of grief and acceptance by tracing and re-embodying migratory ancestral healing practices linking bodies and land. These practices remind us to welcome vulnerability. Be humbled by natural cycles. To live in reciprocity with the land.