I connected a lot with painting at a young age, but at fifteen when I was learning analogue photography and darkroom printing in school, I realised I was falling in love with it. So I took an Art Foundation course knowing I’d probably pursue photography for my BA, which is what I did. But it was so classically photographic that after a few years, I became distressed by it. Even the photo community in London felt really insular, and I could not understand why it was mostly separated from the art community. On top of that, I had some reservations about the many rules of photography. The film’s frames suggested printing it in a rectangular shape, and I didn’t respond well to how rigid it was. As romanticized as this sounds, I wanted photography to feel similar to how a blank canvas feels to a painter. That is why I decided to unlearn a lot of those rules (realizing they were my rules just as much as anything else), and that’s when my sculptural photographs started to take shape.

Smell triggers the greatest nostalgia between all of our senses. Aleppo soap, in particular, has a piercing smell of olives which I recall from childhood visits to the factories, and I wanted it to intoxicate my 2019 ‘Building Blocks’ show at Third Line. The gallery’s smell was so strong that it almost had a reverse effect to the subtly sublime scent of a single bar. That represented my concerns around nostalgia; it isn’t a true depiction of past events, rather an abstraction of them. Its recalling is loaded with longing and exoticization, mirroring my relationship to Syria after being away for eleven years. This led me to photograph jasmine and soil from my grandmother’s garden under the Scanning Electron Microscope at 50,000x magnification. Not only was the resulting image warped from its sheer enlargement, but also from technological glitches. Those alterations allowed me to speak about distorted memory – flashbacks which don’t take you back but rather transport you somewhere else.

On a cellular level, all space is merged and shared, what is different is just the densities of matter. I’ve explored this concept in various ways, and Reaction did so on a formal level. I wanted the rim of the object to mimic the content within the image – a way to free the work of its internal and external tensions. I intended to visually address the freeing of borders from a micro to a macro scale. Enlarging chemical reactions and having them embody their own shape was a chance to play with scale as an interchangeable aspect. I also explored photography’s restraints by slowing down and hyper-magnifying Polaroid’s instantaneous way of image-making. I photographed light on expired film, dissected and scanned certain chemical compositions in very high resolution. Chemical reactions are predictable and precise, but playing with its expiration generates a glitch. Precariousness also exists amongst the predictable order of form!

We’ve evolved in this medium-scaled world to experience things like boundary and solidity. So, for me, it was more interesting to observe a scale which we haven’t evolved to experience, where we are more open to different ways of seeing. When I travel to new places I feel much more awake. I think experimenting with a different scale resonates with that, you allow your perspective to shift.

I began my deconstruction of boundaries through the body, because it’s where our experience of separation and connection initiates. We begin inside a body, we are cut from a body. On a microscale, our skin constantly sheds from body to floor. Although obvious, commenting on this transition was the most important starting point for me. Our experience of the world is heavily dependent on the sense of touch. Therefore, the dead skin samples were collected from my fingertips. Conveniently, I also have very dry cuticles.

I also explore existential and metaphysical dichotomies, real and ideal, the exoticism of memory and truth of its lived experience. And yes, each dichotomy is a side of the same coin- yin and yang is a symbol I try to live by. Down to the level of form, the harmony between opposites indicates the oneness that I attempt to describe in my work. Borders between polarities are illusionary.

When you’re embarrassed, your skin can blush. When you’re fearful, you might tremble. Swallowing at an odd time in a sentence shows nerves. The line between external and internal is fragile, and I find that fascinating. Once when I was using the SEM, accidental glitches occurred as I navigated the sample too quickly. Very soon I began embracing and even provoking them because it was a way to describe the broken information communicated to the external body from within. By observing our sensations as they arise, we can understand our emotions rather than reject or crave them. But sometimes there’s a malfunction like a glitch saying something unintelligible. We can’t always understand what is being transmitted to us. The spasming of emotional or physical communication is something I’m still exploring.

Not necessarily an optimistic outlook, but it describes the way our viewpoints are determined by our perception. Likewise, not everybody sees the same shade when looking at a particular colour. ‘Rose Tinted’ shows how our view is determined by our present and future expectations, and how those assumptions are informed by the meanings we have built upon past experiences (rather than from the experiences themselves). We rarely perceive anything as it is. And by ‘as it is’ I mean not how we want it to be, not how we expect it to be, but how it actually is – without projecting expectation or aversion or desire onto that experience. This year I did an online Philosophy course dissecting Plato’s Theory of Forms. He believed that everything that we see, think and experience partakes in the Form of something. A landscape partakes in the Form of landscape. An ideal one existing outside our spatiotemporal existence, only accessed through the mind. These ideals are perfect and we use them as a reference for evaluating what we experience in this world. This play between real and ideal, or truth and expectation, is something we all negotiate every day, consciously or unconsciously. It forms our individual narrative of reality. The scenes are based on utopian landscapes, where the photographic depictions don’t perfectly align with the carved forms. So, they represent the ideal, and the imagery presents the real – where the perception of something and its reality lay in tension with one another. Some of the images are quite psychedelic, as I wanted the full scope of how the ‘rose-tinted lens’ can operate.

Yes, wanting and seeking certain photographic elements to inject into each form is in itself an expectation of the ideal. It’s an important process as I’m experiencing the very thing the work discusses. I searched for waterfalls all across Dubai (ironically that included the mall), but everything fell short of my ideal version of it.

I think the ‘perfectness’ of Dubai has a kind of Truman Show quality. The city, from its urban planning to its laws and values, is built upon achieving the ideal form. But for me, that just makes the veil of illusion even more apparent.

During lockdown, I was watching YouTube videos which illustrate time-based theories like special relativity and quantum field theory. I was most interested in how science depicts the elusiveness of time. Those theories influenced the shapes of my sculptures by tilting some of them off-axis according to my belief in time’s nonlinearity. I left them white so they could feel like thought- constructs – as that’s what time is to me. Similarly to how memory is formed in our mind before shaping it into an image, I wanted the sculptures to exist as thoughts being constructed into shapes. The white stage references that process. I do find wearing colours a complex action because it warrants thinking – at least for me. This comes from wanting to occupy my mind as little as possible with material decisions. Ideally, my closet would include fifteen items (although I can’t help but have more than that). To me, wearing something other than black or white or beige or grey requires a specific reason. Those are neutral colours, zeros, anything more feels above basic.

Over the years it shifted from serving as a scientific tool to serving as a source of abstraction. In 2009, I was literally describing the micro and macro dialects of scale by photographing my dead skin samples. Throughout the years, its role morphed into communicating via analogies, specifically with glitches. As my interests and research develop, my use of the SEM and other devices, such as the Transmission Electron Microscope and Light Microscope, also will. And vice versa, their technical constraints or abilities continue to enhance my research and concepts. For example, a few years ago I used the TEM to photograph copper from an HV power cable (previously installed in my show When Heartstrings Collapse, 2016), but because the sample wasn’t acidified enough, a beam of electrons fired back at the monitor, and the star-like dot formed my work ‘Electron Beam’. Usually, those instruments’ faults are what serves me most.

The works are changing, evolving, existing and moving simultaneously, but that is happening now. Every moment is change. In my Shift series, I try to describe time’s detachment from the past and present by making sculptures that use shapes to describe theories of time. The process of visualizing scientific qualities lacking physicality is in itself a form of attachment; everything needs to be anchored in space and time to suit our four-dimensional mental constructs. Using 4D space was a way to discuss that. I profoundly respect intuition (something I’m trying to harness more in my life), however, I don’t feel my works explore it enough, yet. That said, a lot of my photographs do, as endlessly shooting isn’t an option when using analogue film. Its very nature is an intuitive process of decision making and shooting.