The latest body of work began as a comment on censorship in Saudi Arabia and it's effects on visual communication. There are regions in Saudi Arabia where people still draw a line across throats in photographs (figuratively cutting the head off.) There are blurred out faces on billboard advertisements. Skirts are crudely lengthened and sleeves added to women's outfits in magazines with black markers. Figurative work is still considered by many to be sinful. As with everything else here, there's a lack of consistency, and things change from region to region, but overall images are highly scrutinized and controlled.

In an attempt to comment on this censorship, I tried to apply the language of the censors to my personal photographs. I began by making line drawings from the photographs to abstract them. I omitted faces, referencing the aforementioned adverts. And kept only the essentials. This preserved the anonymity of my subjects, which allowed me more freedom since it is still a taboo to have one's portrait hanging in a gallery or someone else's home. This is true of many Middle Eastern countries.

It became a game of How much can you tell with how little. When reduced to line drawings or sketches, the images achieved enough distance from the original photographs that neither subjects nor censors could find them objectionable. For me, they became autonomous, and I became interested in the minimal narratives they created.

I've always been interested in how photography functions, and I try to undermine any documentary authority it may possess as a medium. I've always felt that a photograph functions more like a memory, in that it's a singular perspective of a split second in time, entirely subjective and hence impressionable. By etching these drawings back into film and printing them in an analogue darkroom, I'm trying to point out how malleable it is as a medium, even before digital manipulation became so advanced and accessible. So here you have a sketch (from a photograph), drawn into a photograph of a sketchbook/envelope/index card etc. It becomes a highly coded and self-reflexive language. What also interests me is that the information omitted (scratched away emulsion) creates an image of its own, as do the censors to our cultural landscape.

born: 1978, Saudi Arabia

education

The School of The Museum of Fine Arts/ Tufts University, MFA, 2004
School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Postbaccalaureate Diploma, 2001
Wellesley College, BA, 2000

selected publications

European Communities: Re-Orientation, Contemporary Arab Representations. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. p. 92-95, 2008

selected solo or two-person exhibits

Howard Yezerski Gallery: Altered States, Boston, MA 2009
Schneider Gallery: Out Of Line, Chicago, IL, 2008
The Artist Foundation: Sticks and Stones, Boston, MA 2002

selected group shows

European Parliament: Re-Orientation, Contemporary Arab Representations. Brussels, Belgium, Curated by Rose Issa, 2008
G.A.S.P. Gallery: Fetish Gesture, Boston, MA. 2006
Atlanta College of Art: Maximum Flavor: Nicole Cherubini, William Cordova, Sara Haas, Nikki S. Lee, Jonathan Seliger, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, and Hank Willis Thomas." Atlanta, GA. (Under Alias: Sara Haas) 2005
The Museum of Fine Arts: But is it Drawing? Boston, MA 2003/2004