Creating in Times of War: Responses from the UAE

This work explores how trauma is held in the body regardless of what the mind believes it has forgotten. There is always a trigger that pulls the body back, forcing it to face what it thought it had moved past — and it truly never stops. Here, the outline of the body, the silhouette, has been removed, and trauma is looked at from the inside: manifested through the organs rather than through what we perceive as trauma from the outside.

This came directly from the artist's own experience. It began in the colon, which was the first place she could locate and name what the body was holding — during the war, her colon was inflamed, and she knew exactly where and felt it that vividly. From there she began to discover that her organs each respond differently when triggered — that what started as one specific site of inflammation opened into a whole interior landscape, reacting, holding, and being changed by trauma.

Someone once said that people may forget but the land never does. The body works the same way — it is its own kind of land, keeping a record that the mind has tried to leave behind. The textile pieces play with images of trauma, organs, and facial features, and the distortionary relationship between them, looking not only at a single body but at multiple bodies, and how relationships change because of shared trauma. The interior and the relational, the body and the land it belongs to, are deeply intertwined.

Guardians of the Coast takes the form of a large freestanding wooden partition framing hand-painted glass panels. On the glass, the artist attempts to capture the memory of a mangrove forest from her visit — the mangroves painted directly onto the glass, creating a stained-glass effect. The wooden frame is fabricated from Guwaif wood, an invasive tree in the UAE that spreads in ways that can harm the local ecosystem. The material carries its own layered meaning within the work: an invasive plant becomes the frame holding a scene of the beauty, life, and resilience of the land.

The mangrove is an ecosystem that grows in conditions defined by hostility and instability, yet it survives and protects what surrounds it — one of the "guardians of the coast." Its resilience lies not only in survival, but in adaptability, interdependence, and the capacity to keep sustaining life through instability. The artist was especially drawn to its roots, which grow upwards rather than downwards, reaching above the soil for air — an image of both beauty and resilience, deeply connected to the ecological and cultural history of the Gulf coastline.

Over the months of waiting out the tension of the war, she kept returning to the mangroves and the beauty she witnessed there. The same conditions that make the mangrove's survival remarkable are the conditions that were being lived through: the hostility, the uncertainty, the instability. Guardians of the Coast is how she chose to document the war — an attempt to hold that image, a documentation of what was collectively witnessed, and an act of devotion toward the land and its guardians.

Using the sky, natural light, and atmosphere as a lens, With Time follows time as it gathers, shifts, and decays through drawing in the expanded field. The image is drawn through an accumulation of near-invisible marks resting on the edge of sheets of paper, rendering the subject increasingly vulnerable. Part of an extensive body of work dealing with the passage of time and its consequential decay, themes of fragmentation, weight, visibility, and what lies beyond the periphery of vision are central to these drawings.