Growing up with a hidden body and watching television that often erased women entirely, I learned to read images through absence. Coming to America, I found the veiled woman in the media a doubly invisible figure; it was not just the veil, but through the image itself, rendered as "the other," and when she is seen, she is truly not there. The photograph reduces her to a figure of absence. She becomes a surface for projection, mythologized, ghosted, and made into a symbol and fabric; rather than softening this effect, it heightens it.
I tell the story of a woman who refuses to be in the frame but leaves a fabric behind a trace of her refusal to become another ghost. In her absence, photographic ghosts arrive: Victorian mothers, colonial imagery, and archived bodies. I trace the traditions in photography that treat the subject as a ghost. I blend figures across layers of fabric, glass, and projection, where the digital and the physical press against each other. My work stays with its complexities, looking toward the edges of what images obscure.
“My Two Bodies” explores visibility, memory, and the politics of representation. I work with photography, fabric, found objects, and performance to draw attention to the surface of the image and question what is seen and recorded, and what remains at the periphery. Fabric plays a central role in my practice as it was my first point of contact with society as a woman, acting as a second skin that covered both the body and our home. More than a covering, it became an extension of the self, turning everyday into something tactile and embodied.
Through perforated surfaces, shifting reflections, and disrupted light, I resist smooth representation of otherness and instead make visible the cloaking structures through which images are formed.
