While in Exile

“While in Exile, I Grew Up in My City” was made for the Syria Reimagined series. It holds two versions of the same person — a small child and the woman she became — standing together inside a torn photographic frame, the way memory keeps a place alive long after you have left it.

I worked in a soft, grainy grey with small green markers, letting the emptiness around the figures do as much work as the figures themselves. Exile, here, is less an event than a quiet doubling: growing up somewhere you can only return to in your head.