Upon entering a self-contained world, we step into a space where the rules are changed. Challenges to historical representations of identity, gender, and power run deep where one subconsciously leans to a Western othering, toned by knowledge patterned by exposure only to extremes.
The depiction of a bygone era is sometimes absurd, surreal in the way that childhood reminiscences are often cinematic. The intensity of the bond between kin, and to each scene, inspires a performance, a glimpse of what once was. The analog photographic practice fosters a visual intimacy that is palpable, built up and experienced in the moment. The riad, the ancestral home, becomes an island of calm and beauty, autonomy and power, a reality of its own. Framed by references to world events that inform its contemporaneity, confronting the Western view of what it means to be in and of Islamic culture, the image acts as catalyst, as iconography, as visual language .
Binding it all are the subjects, the family, the women; they are the human embodiment of the Riad.
There is no single Muslim reality.
