That’s also why I struggle to exhibit the work. It needs to be seen as a book because a collection of photographs on the wall doesn’t do it. You need to see it as this package with the poor images, the imperfect, the perfect. With that packaging I feel satisfied that I communicated what I needed to communicate. But there will be more. It’s to be continued. It’s happening. It’s still coming for me. I haven’t said everything.
Thana Faroq’s I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows explores her journey leaving war-torn Yemen and experiencing asylum in the Netherlands. Thana decided to make this book to figure out how everything happened – to figure out the war, the escape, the transition, and the unfamiliar. It’s not easy to talk about trauma while you’re living in it because you can’t recognize it. Creating this work enabled her to tackle the trauma and to confront it on her own terms. The images and the words serve as a record, a healing method to register and validate her emotions and experiences during the transition into the unknown.
Faroq left her native Yemen a year after the war broke out in 2015, and never returned. The experience recast her practice, and she began to turn the camera on herself
Faroq left her native Yemen a year after the war broke out in 2015, and never returned. The experience recast her practice, and she began to turn the camera on herself
