My work

I’m a socially-engaged visual artist whose work explores points of contact between systems of power and individual agency, voices that are yet to speak, spaces of in-between-ness, and the body politic. Working with different media and processes, often with a slant on the performative or conversational, I draw heavily on text – found, written, sourced – to explore the nuances of private and public affiliation. My primary point of departure is often through some form of invitation to a shifting public. The nearer/more local that public is, the closer I feel to democratising dimensions within the work, which see me returning often to the same question in different guises – about the spaces we are in, who is present, and who is willing to speak.

My work emerges as video, installation, text; as performance or public realm intervention/encounter; occasionally as song, sometimes print. Be it a war criminal’s six-hour testimonial, my father’s back catalogue of emails, or an existing artwork - archive often also feels key, providing avenues into the currencies of the political.

My creative practice is consistently drawn back to spaces of interaction and activation, with a focus largely beyond galleries or exhibiting regimes as final destinations. Born and raised in Mosul, Iraq for my first 10 years, and living in Wales since 1993, internally there is always some form of harking back. Perhaps enlisting people through creative practice is my way of choreographing versions of belonging, where concepts such as home, return, or one’s place in the world, are shifting sites of both imagination, possibility, and desire.