This artistic research project explores how dressing becomes an aesthetic and political strategy in the context of postmigration. Through a series of night-time photographs taken in Finnish forests, the work examines how clothing, body language, and spatial presence respond to systems of border control, discrimination, and institutional scrutiny. These forests are not symbolic backdrops but charged landscapes tied to personal memory, recalling moments of being smuggled through Europe. They serve as spaces of concealment, disorientation, and fragile autonomy, where the artist can appear without the obligation to explain.

The project uses clothing as a tool of negotiation, shaped by fear, suspicion, and the desire to both belong and remain ungraspable. The garments in the photographs are part of my everyday life. They are neither costumes nor fashion statements in the traditional sense. Instead, dressing becomes a method of asserting control and navigating social and institutional thresholds. This practice draws inspiration from my mother, a former athlete in Syria, who used meticulous self-presentation to demand respect in hostile environments.

The work exists at the intersection of performance, visual politics, and postmigrant critique. It asks how dressing can serve as a visual interruption within a world that demands constant self-disclosure. It proposes that freedom is not found in full visibility but in the right to remain partially hidden, unclassified, and irreducible.

More info coming soon.