I created this work as an homage to my family and my hometown, Damascus, Syria. My goal was to visually translate my fear of abandonment, a feeling connected to my experience of exile, during which the roles of parent/daughter and child/caregiver were reversed. The title of the work is “Immemorial”, which refers to how eternal such fears and worries can feel, rather than them being passing or transient. In “Raheel” and the three portraits, “Father, Mother and Daughter”, I tried to approach those feelings by reversing the image of the dying parent, drawing on the iconographic scene of “The Dormition of the Virgin Mary”. Moreover, I used archival and found images in the case of a “Self-portrait with a Mask” to time and culture code the picture.

In this project, photography and photomontage were used to fuse the different elements and questions from my biography together, resulting in new surfaces where the past and present meet and disintegrate.