I Dress, Therefore I Disrupt (Self-portraits), 2025
40 x 50 cm
Light painting, photography, inkjet print (Giclée), oak frames
Shot in the forests of Finland that recall the hidden geographies of my displacement during the 2015 refugee crisis, this series of night self-portraits explores the right to opacity, as proposed by Édouard Glissant.
Through light painting and long exposure, I reclaim the language of visibility once used to surveil and control. These are not reconstructions of memory, but counter-images. The light that once exposed and endangered now becomes a tool of refusal, defiance, and authorship.
Dressing is not performance, it is a daily survival tactic, a political act, a visual disruption.
Created in collaboration with Finnish artist Viktor Palm.
This solo exhibition is a part of a project I conducted during my residency at Platform in Finland.
I Dress, Therefore I Disrupt, 2025
Solo Exhibition – Platform, Vaasa
Dressing is never neutral. It is a negotiation shaped by fear, desire, memory, and refusal. In this exhibition, clothing becomes a strategy of survival, not performance, but a lived response to systems of control.
Through photography, sculpture, drawing, and text, I Dress, Therefore I Disrupt explores the politics of appearance under postmigrant conditions. The garments are not curated for spectacle; they emerge from daily life, from moving through checkpoints, institutions, and borders. Dressing becomes a tactical act: to signal or obscure, to pass or to resist.
Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity, the right not to be fully known, I refuse the demand for clarity. I do not dress to be understood. I dress to remain complex, to inhabit presence on my own terms.
Alongside the exhibition, I'll also be sharing my research text that I have conducted while working on this project during my residency in Vaasa.