The starting point is personnal dreams and mixed up memories, as well as narratives of women’s arrests, and of positions and acts, from daily life, those defying patriarchy.

I photograph myself in various positions, to be able to paint those gestures, avoiding using anonymous models, whom often in painting history, were used to represent someone else. or, I use imagery from images found on the internet, to continue what’s at stake in the painting.

Typically, a painting of a nude woman made by Lebanese painter Moustafa Farroukh, namely “The Two Prisoners”, dated to 1929, would portray a woman, positioned in an “orientalist position”, with a breast revealed from under the white sensual textile dress. In her right arm, the waterpipe pipe falls from between her fingers in a non-chalant way, as she gazes in dreams, to the windowceal, whereby a yellow canari is encaged. The face of the woman is of a rather local looking woman, assumebly, but most probbaly, Farroukh would use models who have another background, to portray the naked body. Women in such portraits are totally submmissive, and playing a role to please the gaze of the male painter. We don’t witness the power that emanates from the bodies of women in our region, women who have to fight constantly against a patriarchal and unfair ruled society.

In “The MOther Of David and Goliath”, a critique to a Lebanese trend in women is at stake as well: Many decide to go for surgery: to enlarge their breasts, or lips, or fake parts of their bodies, thinking that this would please the man. They become all similar, a child cannot recognise her/his/ their mother for instance anymore. Yet these types of women are sharing the stage in some paintings, with women who on the contrary, praise their bodies, no matter how the body looks like, even in its most hysteric positions, or if under arrest, or if hanged, or on the way to be burned to death.

In “The Mother of David and Goliath”, the bodies of the women is often that of those who want to escape their multiple arrests, in various positions. The arrest is also that of an “orientalist” image, a woman who tries today to use every artifical means to please certain type of men, but not only thay.

We also encounter portraits inspired by advocates for women’s liberation, and this continues visually, by a continious study of colours and shapes, as well as bodies, figures, all coming from my personal experience with my own body, as well as textiles I am working with, images that haunt me, and music that I play and listen to as I paint.

But a lot more is happening. As if no one can stop the body from dancing. Are we dancing on our own death? Arrested by our dancing bodies, and their uncontrolled messy movement -controlled by intimidating surrounding factors and aggressions? Are we resisting? What then, and how?

Painting resembles more something else: what kind of an exercise is that?

” More we specialise, more stupid we get” said once one of these women, guess who?