Boston Palestine Film Festival

“There is a peculiar madness in failing to grasp what animals understand instinctively: you do not soil the ground that sustains you.”

This body of work is composed of images of the tree of life, a bird, water, fire, and susurration. They reference Ishtar, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess, while drawing upon a wider symbolic language through which the human body and the earth—Ardh—are understood as interconnected. The images are formed by arranging bullets into grid patterns. The bullet, both weapon and phallic object, evokes patriarchy and colonialism: forces imposed upon the Ardh and upon the people fundamentally connected to it.

Ardh means earth or land in Arabic. I think of Ardh in relation to the clay I use to cast these works, the same earth from which our bodies emerge and to which they return. For me, Ardh is an inherently matriarchal concept: a sacred, living entity rather than a commodity to be divided, possessed, and owned.

Clay connects these works to the tree of life, but also to archaeology. Ancient ceramic objects have long been used to reconstruct histories and make claims about the past. Yet archaeology, despite its supposed objectivity, can also become ideological: a means of legitimizing one people’s historical claim to land over another’s. Sacred objects are similarly displaced from their original meanings and transformed into commodities—excavated, collected, bought, sold, and possessed.

Against this, I understand clay as something embodied. There is a spiritual relationship between pottery and the human form: we, too, are made from earth. The objects I make are fragile, yet they belong to a lineage of clay objects that have endured for millennia. They survive their makers and as witnesses, become material manifestations of time. We live in a time of rapid displacement and the systemic uprooting of life. As my voice ripples through the wet clay, cracked and unglazed tree trunks become monuments to cultural and ecological resilience.

These are orange, pomegranate, and olive trees. Within this forest, the ancient medium of clay becomes a living archive of what it means to persist. The landscape refuses rigid hierarchies and instead follows the wisdom of a forest. Roots do not descend in orderly lines. They tangle, spread, cross, and connect the sculptures to one another. Visitors are invited to wander without a prescribed path, encountering trees that sometimes remain deliberately unidentifiable.

There is play in this wandering, but the play is tactical. It resists the fragmentation and imposed order of the contemporary world, the forest is therefore both archive and proposition: a testament to the necessity of planting, growing, tending, and protecting our Ardh—Mother Earth—even within the cracks of a landscape shaped by violence.