This series of collaged works is composed of gouache, watercolor, and mixed media paintings made directly on torn pages from The Lance of Kanana, a 19th-century orientalist novel that romanticizes Arab identity through the trope of the “noble Arab.” By intervening directly on the text, the work critiques the original narrative while reclaiming it through personal, cultural, and spiritual imagery. As an American with Palestinian roots, I approach these pages as both artifact and inheritance, returning through ancestry, myth, and memory to consider representation, belonging, and reclamation. Each painting becomes a site where fable, history, and speculative identity blur; inherited narratives are challenged, overwritten, or illuminated; and joy, beauty, humor, and tenderness emerge through acts of subversion.

While each intervened page stands alone, transforming an extracted phrase into a visual moment, the works collectively foreground the physicality of torn paper and the language of rupture, absence, and repair. Together, the collaged pages form a rhythmic field of word and image, holding tension between the orientalist source and a re-authored personal narrative. The exhibition asks how cultural and national identities can be rewritten not by erasing history, but by intervening in its remnants—opening space for multiplicity, resistance, and new forms of belonging. here...

FOR WORD WAS HIS MEMORY: an exhibition on reclaiming

"Tomorrow the Sun Will Rise"; Juried Invitational, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC 2026
"Make A Way: Palestinian Artists, Text and Image" , Group Exhibition, Rhizome, Washington, DC 2026
"For Word Was His Memory: an exhibition on reclaiming"; Solo Show, Ashe & Norton Gallery, 2026