Alqumit Alhamad for VOGUE wearing a dress by Sarkis Dersahakian

This project was developed in collaboration with the Lebanese Armenian Palestinian fashion designer and drag artist Sarkis Dersahagian. Together we created an experimental dress that sits between fashion, performance, and protest. The work draws from the aftermath of civil war and from personal and collective memories, while also imagining a speculative future shaped by rupture, survival, and reinvention.

At the center of the piece is a reworked version of the Al Jazeera logo. This gesture was intentional and confrontational. It responds to what I see as a contradiction in how the network approaches queer lives. While Al Jazeera’s international platforms often speak the language of inclusion and human rights, its Arabic language coverage continues to frame queerness as deviant, pathological, or culturally threatening. The same lives are recognized in one context and erased or vilified in another.

The dress is not meant to resolve this contradiction but to expose it. By placing the logo within the context of fashion and drag, the work reclaims a visual symbol of authority and turns it into a site of critique. The garment functions as a form of resistance, not through didactic messaging but through visibility, exaggeration, and refusal. It insists on queer presence in spaces where it is often denied and treats fashion as a political language rather than decoration.

Hijacking Copenhagen Fashion Week, 2023

Performance, logo design by me, dress by Sarkis Dersahagian