Photography Collage Archiving Manipulating Analogue Digital
Dissolving Matters
Exploring the parallel decay of photographic matter and personal memory. Working with film negatives from my personal archive, photographs of places and people from my life in Iraq. I bleach, scratch, peel, and seal each negative with hot glue over the course of days. The negatives are then layered against botanical textiles and organic materials before being scanned against different light sources. The original image slowly surrenders its materiality, giving way to something that could not have existed before the intervention.
Drawing on Bergson's understanding of memory as inseparable from matter, it is always a bodily, material act. These images ask what remains when both the photograph and the memory it held begin to fade.
What emerges is neither archive nor abstraction. It is the residue of materiality in the act of fading.
Photosynthesis
A series of photographic collages made by layering negatives and bleached photographic prints, then scanning the assembled surfaces against bright window daylight and different textures. The botanical forms of flowers, leaves, and stems are drawn from printed fabrics and floral photographic material, physically manipulated and chemically intervened upon before being exposed to natural light during scanning. The daylight does what daylight does: it reveals, transforms, and produces colour and form where it had otherwise been removed for the naked eye.
The series takes its name from the biological process it mirrors, light converting organic matter into something new. Flora here is not documented but reconstructed, subjected to the same forces that sustain it in nature. Light and time transform the final image into one that it had never been.
Efllorescence
Efflorescence is a process of crystalline dissolution or flowering. Capturing this duality, these photographs are a simultaneous decay and bloom. Where meaning is removed and reconfigured, where fragments fade, and others emerge.
This series of photographic collages is made by manipulating and layering negatives, prints and textiles, then scanning against different light sources. The result is a new image displaced from its original counterparts.
Inspired by the writings of Philosopher Paul Ricoeur on memory and history as the sum of external cosmological and internal phenomenological time. Memory and its artefacts are not duplicates of a past as it occurred. They are collusions of recollections, beliefs, imagery, discourse, sounds, and emotions bound to their relation to the present.
Here, the photographs transcend their initial form, they shed, invoke additions, and flower into a new entity.
The Land Beyond Us All
This series of photographic collages is made from personal archives of the landscapes of Kurdistan, Iraq. The images stem from negatives, digital captures, and personal familial archives, all of which are then manipulated through their respective techniques of bleaching, layering, and chemical intervention. The new visuals are then printed, arranged and scanned to form a final product sitting between reconstruction and reminiscence.
Inspired by cultural wisdom where land carries memory and the contradictory nature of human recollection that is fragmented and in a state of slow in-flux decay. Here, the images combine varying familial moments across decades and landscapes, fading into a legible oblivion where details are omitted but the prudence of Mother Earth remains.
Cosmos Within
Philosopher Paul Ricœur wrote that historical time is the sum of external cosmological and internal phenomenological time. History and memory are not duplicates of a past as it occurred. They are collusions of recollections, beliefs, imagery, discourse, sounds, and emotions bound to their relation to the present.
Working with personal film negatives from my archives of photographs of places and people from my life in Iraq, I bleach, scratch, peel, and seal each negative with hot glue over the course of days. The original image slowly fades into a reconstruction where elements external to that past interfere with and reframe the memory. The negatives are then scanned against different light sources and materials, producing dispersed colours and textures that resemble an internal cosmology.
As fundamentally temporal beings, our existence is a dance between nostalgia and anticipation that collides in the present. These images are that dance, the cosmos within.
To Zakho’s Memory
Exhibited in Postcards: Images & Whispers - Group Exhibition
Melina Merkouri Cultural Center, Athens, Greece, April 2026
Curated by Eleni Mouzakiti, Women's Photo Festival
Documentary photographs of home layered with familial archives. Composed from images taken over the years alongside scans of old family photographs, each work forms a new single non-time-bound image. Images that exist beyond a singular location or era, combining our existence and most precious memories into one story.
The final image is dreamy and lucid, a visual manifestation of the mysticism of Iraq.
Exhibited alongside a personal poem dedicated to my birth city, Zakho.
Returns
Exhibited in Collage - Group Exhibition
Kutubna Cultural Center, Dubai, UAE, May to August 2026
Curated by Nora Qudah
Documentary photographs of my first return to my maternal home, Mosul. Composed from images taken from a visit after a decade of absence, each work forms a new single non-time-bound image of Mosul beyond its years of conflict.
Women’s Time
Exhibited in OverLooked - Group Exhibition
The Loop, London, UK, March 2026
Curated by Suda Mohamedin and Nasty Gallery
Passing space and time, the women of my lineage are the backbone of the sites and memories that have built our familial mythology. This work collages personal photographs and family archives into new, non-time-bound stories. Including images spanning from 2025 to 1962, the collages break the boundaries of memory and intertwine different days and nights into a single picture. An ode to the feminine magical realism of my existence.
Standing Still, Moving
A series documenting the human body suspended between stillness and motion. While documenting my life in between London and Kurdistan-Iraq, my two homes, I found a pattern of a threshold state. A standing body, stuck in motion, deliberating its next action while the world moves around it.
I shoot on film, carrying only one roll at a time. This limitation forces me to be present and not gravitate to my camera at every moment. It was through this discipline of waiting that I began to notice a recurring quality in the moments I was drawn to. Bodies neither fully at rest nor fully in motion, caught in the space between one state and another. The boy standing at the edge of the pool while someone swims behind him. Two men at the crest of a hill, looking. A woman absorbed in her stall.
I noticed this quality after the fact, when editing the work. What emerged was not a series about place or cultural difference, but about a condition that transcends both. The suspended moment is universal. It happens in a Kurdish market and on a London street corner in the same way, with the same quality of presence.
More images ranging from experiments, collages, analogue photography, and life documentations.