ZA :

In your body of work titled The Earth Would Die If The Sun Stopped Kissing Her (2022), you write “These photographs are not grand narratives. They are more like fragments. Moments that feel almost unreal but aren’t.” I’m intrigued by the ‘everydayness,’ of art, and wanted to delve deeper into this statement. How does one truly photograph something that’s felt but not known?

EA :

Well, I think in order to create something ‘felt,’ you have to feel deeply. Having a real sensitivity to your inner world, as well as your surroundings, allows you to notice these moments. I think I am the type of person who really enjoys silence and moves through the world slowly. And I think this pace allows you to be more attuned to everything around you. I’m an observer. Listening has become a way of seeing for me. It’s how I process my own emotions and understand how to express them. When I started off, I was doing a lot more documentary work, capturing candid, raw moments as I saw them. Over the years my focus has shifted, I’m less interested in documenting just what we see and more drawn to exploring what we feel and dream. At some point, I realised that by blurring the line between fact and fiction, and allowing imagination to lead, I could be both intuitive and inventive and make work that taps into a sense of magical realism.

ZA :

Gender, femininity, and identity seem to be recurring within your work. Could you talk about what draws you to these themes? And have your bodies of work changed the way you perceive cultural and social norms linked to gender?

EA :

I would say that my work draws heavily on my own lived experience. And while the themes you mentioned have definitely shown up in my work, I didn’t necessarily plan them. I allow my feelings to guide what I want to explore and use my art as a way to process. That’s really my starting point. My work is essentially a form of therapy because it’s my way of understanding complex feelings that I don't always have the words to describe. It's been a lot of unlearning and learning, and at the same time questioning the social norms that I grew up with, and the systems that have shaped me.

ZA :

In Succession (2019) you explore Oman’s modern history through the lens of the archive. But you don’t claim to be creating a repository of truth in the silent years of isolation before 1970; instead acknowledge that “the archive is not a static repository of truth; it is a dynamic space of negotiation, shaped by power and perception.” Would you be able to elaborate this idea of making work that is reimagined? And where does one begin?

EA :

I would say that for this particular project, I started with my own faded memories about people, places, events, and incidents that happened at the time that I was exploring this body of work. A sense of longing really shapes my practice overall. I find Robert Hass’s idea of longing deeply poignant, “because desire is full of endless distances,” - it captures that ache and expansiveness I keep circling back to. So, whether it was stories passed down by family members, rumours, or my own memories - I was piecing it all together. Memories are really fascinating to me because they are incredibly unreliable. They’re reshaped by time, and emotion, and are constantly fragmented. I find that memories are essentially put together based on what we choose to remember, and what we choose to forget. Therefore, with this body of work, I was approaching it very loosely. I started out by taking newsletters collected by my father and scanning them for posterity. And as I was looking over the slowness of the high-resolution uploads, my eyes were drawn to certain elements within the photographs that I was looking at. It could be an interesting background, a flower, a gesture, or a gaze. So, I made a collection of these images, categorized them methodically, and printed them. When I lay them all down on the floor, the sheer volume allowed me to make connections between the imagery. I wasn’t interested in telling a story about how Oman was formed, I’m not a historian, but I was interested in memory, power and photography’s role in shaping a national identity. I was also sure I wanted to make a photobook about this work because I’m fascinated by how two images placed side by side can speak to one another, forming new associations in the space between them. I wanted to play with that - to suggest rather than explain, and to invite the viewer to complete the thought. Another thing to point out is that the images displayed are re-photographed by me to show certain parts of the image, so it’s never actually the entirety of the original image. I was interested in creating a dream-like sequence, and not a linear narrative.

ZA :

While looking through your portraits of women, I noticed that the majority of them are looking directly into the camera, as opposed to away. I was wondering if this was a deliberate act of assertiveness during your image-making?

EA :

Yes, this is very much deliberate. I also photograph both, women as well as men with their eyes closed. It’s a moment of reverie that I love to continually photograph. I’ve always been interested in the stillness of eyes closed, even in death. But coming back to the direct gaze of women, it’s a conscious decision because I really like the tension between that penetrating gaze and the viewer - it’s about presence, about taking up space. When you’re taking a portrait of somebody, you’re essentially putting a part of yourself into that image. So, in a way, every portrait becomes a kind of self-portrait. When and how I take pictures of people, is reflective of how I feel at that moment or a feeling I want to explore more deeply. I want the people in my photographers to have a sense of agency and see the act of taking their portrait as a form of collaboration. Looking through the lens is like holding up a magnifying glass. It changes the way you see. You begin to notice things differently. The camera allows you to be extremely present, and things you might have seen numerous times, suddenly look distinctive. I also think it’s important to photograph people with a sense of empathy. It helps you to understand them, what makes them uncomfortable or how far you can gently push them outside their comfort zones, to photograph something that you see in them that they might not yet see in themselves.

ZA :

You’ve made a few projects such as Banat Al Fi'9a (The Silver Girls), 2022-2023 and Elsewhere (2023-2024) using AI; but it still manages to lie within the realm of your own photo-making. Now that AI has become bigger than itself and artists are using it in unethical ways, could you delve into your experiences of holding onto honesty and sincerity while using it as a tool to make work?

EA :

I think so far, my experience has been positive, because I feel like I have a strong enough visual language and ability for storytelling where I’m not allowing it to dominate me. I’m not an artist because of AI, and it’s not the reason that I’m creative. I think as artists, we are driven by a sense of curiosity, and that’s extremely important. To make art, you need to be curious about the world and the things around you. And in that vein, AI as a tool sparked this sense of marvel. When you hit ‘enter’, the algorithm is being reshaped and resculpted, and it’s giving you something that it cannot churn out again. There is a level of uncertainty that you surrender to, and it’s this kind of unpredictability in the image-making process that I’m interested in. Because when you think about it, even when you’re taking a photograph, you’re open to making mistakes or being guided in a different direction by chance. There is something fascinating about letting that randomness challenge and stretch the way I work. The result feels like a collaboration where control and chance work together. It pushes the boundaries of what an image can be while still holding onto the essence of my vision. The similarity in my photography and my AI- collaborations comes from the fact that I feed the program a lot of my own images, so it’s essentially creating within my already established visual language. I keep the visible artifacts and imperfections that were present in earlier AI outputs because they act like a timestamp. This was important because I didn’t want to fool the viewer into thinking that this was a photographic work. I want it to be clear that this is AI work, made at a specific moment in time. Photography is such a young medium that has already gone through multiple changes. From black-and-white to colour, from analogue to digital, and now to AI; so, for me as an image-maker, it would be a disservice not to explore this new tool and see what you can do with it. But having a strong voice and a strong point of view is essential. I saw a video breaking down how Timbaland sampled a DEVO song to create something completely new, turning it into the sound for Oops (Oh My) by Tweet. It blew my mind. The best artists are true alchemists who pull from everywhere, sampling bits and pieces, and transforming them into something that feels fresh, unexpected, and completely their own.