العربية

On Feminist Return(s): The Work of Cindy Chehab, Huda Takriti, Maïssane AlIbrahimi, and Nour Shantout

Introduction

For decades, art history has been a collection of narratives, each generation building upon, revising, or contesting the stories of those who came before. These acts of revision are central to how cultural histories are made. In the Arab world, such contemporary revisions are linked to resistance against colonial legacies, including gender-based state control, intensifying climate injustices, among other pressing conflicts. As these realities evolve, the methods artists use to create meaningful and reflective work are integral to these narratives. This is not simply a matter of representation, but of reconsidering how art participates in historical revisions and facilitates the translocal and transregional circulation of care and witnessing.

This essay examines the practices of four emerging artists: Maïssane AlIbrahimi, Cindy Chehab, Nour Shantout, and Huda Takriti, mapping their feminist and politically engaged perspectives, and showing how their work addresses inquiries and legacies established by earlier generations. Through sustained work with archives, materials, and acts of refusal, these artists establish connections across temporal, geographic, and sociopolitical contexts. Their gestures, sometimes fragmentary, sometimes assertive, remain in active conversation with the histories they inherit, disrupt, or reimagine. Their approaches to displacement, archival erasure, and material resistance highlight that the stakes of grounded art-making remain as urgent as in previous generations.¹

Archive, Absence, and Return

These gestures of feminist tradition and return unfold differently in each of the four practices. Beginning with Huda Takriti, she enters the notion of return through archival disruption and refusal. A Syrian artist who first trained as a painter, Takriti’s practice now spans video, installation, lecture-performances, and archival research, widening the scope of her inquiries. Her work is shaped by a layered political consciousness, rooted in family history, the rupture of the Syrian revolution in 2011, and a critical engagement with the Pan-Arab period. Rather than reproducing familiar
narratives, her work distils the narration process itself, shifting attention to what is usually expected to be visible from a well-known event and then unsettling that expectation. Her work treats the archive as an unstable container of postcolonial possibility, open to “contamination” through an almost fiction and overlapping temporalities. Her works often embrace the absurdity of archival records, not as a distancing device, but as a way to reroute perception and undermine narrative authority. In this sense, the archive becomes a shifting vessel rather than a fixed source, a space where memory resists closure.

In Refusing to Meet Your Eye (2022) Takriti engages directly with the politics of vision. The title of the work is borrowed from a line by a journalist describing an iconic photograph of female freedom fighter Leila Khalid, a symbol of Palestinian resistance. The video follows the story of Khalid and her fellow PFLP member, Salim Al-Issawi, during the 1969 hijacking of aplane from Rome to occupied Tal Abib (Tel Aviv), which was diverted to Damascus, where Khalid and Al-Issawi bombed the empty cockpit of the craft. Takriti focuses the viewer’s attention on the fact that the unknown photographer assigned to document the event by PFLP forgot to remove the lens cap, resulting in a black image, an archival trace of nothing that insists on presence.

Rather than correcting a flawed archival record, even when a crucial part of it is missing, Takriti makes it whole - asking what it means to politicize and deconstruct vision itself. This isn't a search for archival truth, but rather a feminist gesture of refusal: to meet the eye, to satisfy the politics of records, to narrate on no terms but her own - terms rooted in collective memory and resistance. These terms are entangled with the ghosts of colonial violence, and legacies that cover up truths, and mainly women’s. The work layers this ghost-image with photographs of Khalid smiling defiantly during her trial, archival maps and models of the airport. These draw attention to the structure of the story itself, and the flickering light scanning archival materials is mirrored in the scene Takriti constructs: an archival room, boxes on racks, the “research” made visible to the viewer. Generally, in Takrtiti’s work, this absence could be interpreted as what she calls a “placeholder” for undocumented resistance acts. The absence insists on presence, politicizing the act of looking and refusing to meet the gaze of institutional history on its own terms.

In the film On Another Note (2024), Takriti further complicates the relationships between storytelling, art, and inherited struggle. Across three channels, the work merges archival fragments with her mother’s voice, Souheir Takriti, who speaks about Hikmat al-Habbal, Takriti’s grandmother, a teacher and textile artist in 1960s Kuwait. These fragments form a personal oral history, rooted in legacies, textile practices, and memory. While the piece addresses the Palestinian and Syrian displacement, it centers the women themselves: their stories, silences, and unrealized dreams. The unfinished textile piece by her grandmother becomes a memorial object, a token of grief, suspended time, and interrupted futures.

Takriti refers to these layered forms of engagement as transitional, not only in medium, but in her thinking about narrative and display. "Over the past few years I have noticed a shift in my work. This shift is mainly a result of a deeper engagement with text whether it was script writing for the videos or longer essays about the topics I am engaging with" she notes, gesturing to the multiple entry points a viewer might take. These stories resist linear resolution, leaving space for the viewer to connect fragments rather than receive them. “By allowing fiction to find its place in the work it opens up beyond the boundaries of the autobiographical genre and allows the viewers to access the work through a different lens. My works in general resist fixation as I re-edit the videos each time they are shown, depending on the space any the way they are installed. This results with a fluid engagement with the works, for me and the viewers alike, allowing it to open up for different interpretations.”

These threads return in Revisitation in Three Acts (2024), a method through which her practice creates a space for follow-up artworks that built on previous pieces. In this multimedia installation, where photographs from On Another Note reappear, now printed on fabric, leaning on metal bars. In doing so, the installation challenges how history is recorded and recirculated. Here, the many versions of its exhibition architecture, is not just a framing device, but part of the visual language. The installation functions as an extended text, a footnote, a preface, an additional layer of meaning that asks us to reconsider the ways we recognize and frame stories. All these historical clues shift and take new form once we register them within a frame. Even her videos, she notes, undergo re-edits when shown-subtle, often unnoticeable shifts that resist finality.

Finally, this extends also into her Clarity is the Closest Wound to the Sun (2023), and the digital photo montage Notes on/for a Film (2023), where Takriti turns to North Africa through a Pan-Arab lens. Drawing on Zohra Drif’s autobiography, she was part of the National Liberation Front of Algeria (FLN), and fragments from the film The Battle of Algiers (1966), she layers text, archival imagery, and film memory to expose how women freedom fighters have been visually silenced or flattened. “I found many contradictions,” Takriti reflects, “to what I knew of the resistance in Algeria from my mother and from the books and magazines both my parents had.” Rather than reproducing history, the work interrupts it. In this critical pairing, she reveals how dialogue written for the female fighters was removed by the Italian film director, Gillo Pontecorvo, who deemed it “weak.” Instead, women were visually foregrounded as symbols, appearing from behind smoke. “I find this contradictory to Zohra’s narrative,” she adds, “and I was thinking of this work as an opening/extension to the video shown on the other side of the [installation] wall.

This material layering, as smoke or symbols, is not about clarity. “Without being too didactic,” she says, “I wanted to leave traces, not overexplain.” The montage becomes a soft confrontation, between resistance and erasure. This space, between what is shown and what is withheld, finds a quiet kinship with Cindy Chehab’s own negotiation of absence and return.

Cindy Chehab, an emerging Lebanese filmmaker, her work turns to the sea as both archive and metaphor. The looping waves that open her website set the tone: soothing yet unsettled, echoing the ambiguities of Mona Hatoum’s Turbulence (2012) and Etel Adnan’s echoing words on the sea, rooted in politics. It comes as no surprise that these two figures, despite being often referenced recently, remain deeply resonant. Both lived in Lebanon, yet neither belonged exclusively to one background. They carried Palestinian, Syrian, and Greek lineages, but were most deeply grounded in the Lebanese landscape and its ongoing political uncertainty.

Chehab’s work departs from similar waters, through the shores of Cyprus, where she lived temporarily, and where her own bodily connection to Lebanon is often evoked. Having grown up in Lebanon, she explores the inherited structures of colonial and post–civil war life. Her work moves between questions of gender, intimacy, and migration, yet increasingly turns towards reimagining women’s histories within family structures. She uses oral history and community-based processes to challenge dominant narratives, reflecting on the relationships between women in the family and her critical engagement with archives. This is where Chehab’s recent film practice aligns with a broader feminist tradition: working outside the official record by privileging lived memory and women’s voices. “Film in itself is a male project,” she told me while speaking about her engagement with Western film programming and curation. Her attention to archival materials, familial, sonic, or institutional, reveals both critique and care. “Oral history attempts to destabilize the authority of written historical narratives and records, especially in Lebanon, where much has been hidden or destroyed,” she added, “The absence is important.”

In her early film Seated Roots (2021), shaped through poetic exchanges with people from different generations in Beirut, the focal point is a chair, a witness to gatherings and absences of civil life. They speak to her of architecture, history, and what still lingers in the city's fabric. It is an attempt to articulate and sit through those reflections that return, and to show the strangeness of such reconnection. The notion of return recurs in her work, though it is not always desired or possible: “There’s a bit of romanticising the return, but return to what?” Instead, the work aims for a kind of “cyber return,” experienced not through grounded presence but via mediated witnessing: “When the recent war happened [2024], we watched it on a laptop. What happened on the ground, we cannot know.” So this sense of return in her work is a necessary feminist grounding element to understanding traumatic events.

This interplay of place, memory, and inherited position continues in A Breather on the Pavement of Strangers (2025), where she draws poetic parallels between Beirut and Cyprus. The film features voices of those living in Cyprus: a young man who speaks of Palestine and recounts his journey by boat, ending in Pournara, a military camp turned reception center; a woman from Armenia displaced by conflict; and others caught in generational questions of belonging, across the Greek and Turkish sides of the island. Chehab herself appears in fragments, a ghostly, searching presence. The work is as much a return to the body as it is to place.

Chehab describes her methodology as “ethno-biographical,” yet distances herself from academic formalisms: “I prefer films that come from intimate sites. We carry conflicts with us, generational trauma, and also the subject of the film I want to work with.” Her work often begins in personal experience, but remains a portal into wider community narratives. She notes the importance of learning how to make films that resist Eurocentric framings, especially in contexts with limited access to resources. Lastly, she spoke to me about a key work: Women who Sing (2026) Chehab approached the video work with archival material, handled with care and caution, returning into a song and dance practice, the Zar, a ritual that allows North African women to form community and healing. Her own face and photographic childhood memories appear in this film, intertwined with the echo of women she has not met or known yet connected with. “I have no right to work on this archive, but I tried to be loyal to these women. The little decisions matter.”

There is a feminist stake in Chehab’s practice that lies not only in the films’ content but in the curatorial and film screening choices that frame them. Her films are often developed through community dialogue and collaborative workshops. In a recent public programme she co-curated, Chehab collaborated with other women to stage screenings addressing gender, violence, and language. One film featured a character from Iran wearing hijab; another explored the absence of the word “rape” in Urdu. “We tried to have a conversation as part of the curatorial text, asking: to whom are we screening these films? The location is very important. When, where, and why is important to redesigning the narrative.” For Chehab, these curatorial decisions, what is shown, where, and to whom, are integral to shifting narratives in postcolonial contexts. As she puts it: “What are the urgencies? That’s the question.”

Material as Method, Care as Resistance

The practices of Nour Shantout and Maïssane Al Ibrahimi share a commitment to material as a political agent. Both move between forms and geographies, treating their chosen mediums, whether thread, sculpture or sugar, not as neutral matter but as active participants in feminist resistance.

When I first encountered Shantout’s work, it was through one of her embroidery installations, deeply rooted in questions of labour, Palestinian Syrian displacement, and feminist resistance. Her broader practice moves between textile, sculpture and installation, treating materials not as mediums but as carriers of grief, resistance, and unlearning. Her work resists the simple tethering of her art to biography, aware of the burden of representation placed on artists from violent geographies. Instead, her work builds what she calls “tools”, historical, political, and material - that can hold layered narratives. In her hands and the hands of women she collaborates with, embroidery becomes a feminist strategy: slow, resistant to institutional pace, and open to ancestral knowledge. Her work also investigates what she calls “geopolitical zones,” particularly the camps of Shatila and Yarmouk in Lebanon and Syria, as a way to reflect on alienation and the mechanisms of dehumanisation created by Empire.

Her key work Searching for the New Dress (2022) deepens this methodology. Here Shantout treats the embroidered dress as both garment and archive, tracing how threads migrate like people, carrying movement, adaptation, and loss. This work is not nostalgic, grounding itself in questions of labour and the politics of craft. Stitched by Shantout, the work embodies nonetheless how women’s hands preserve knowledge and survival under conditions of exile. The work exposes embroidery as a living political form, not a folkloric object, insisting that each stitch holds fragments of grief, endurance, and memory. In this sense, Searching for the New Dress embodies the “tale” of feminist legacies. Material as method, care as resistance. As she writes: “My work is situated in continuity with the political application of Palestinian embroidery, a practice that emerged out of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Furthermore, my practice centers around themes of subjugated heritage, counter-memory and history, labour and alienation, from a post-colonial feminist perspective.”

Her method resists fixity. Embroidery is not simply a technique but a feminist gesture of unlearning, a way to stitch together fragmented narratives and loosen what colonial preservation has tried to bind. “Embroidery takes on a delayed temporality,” she tells me, “a time between threads. It resists the pace of institutional production.” She traces garments once worn by breastfeeding women, farmers, and labourers, fragments of life caught between archival frameworks and colonial museums. In her hands, the stitch becomes a feminist act of unlearning, of turning away from academic standardisation and toward ancestral knowledge.

This politics of the stitch extends into her early installations, where the architecture of display becomes as crucial as the object itself. At Work (2018), a sculptural installation made of steel and mixed media. Originally a saddle for a commercial display, Shantout reclaimed the object once the display changed. “It became a sculpture the moment it arrived at my studio,” The work was later exhibited in multiple venues: in a feminist art association, in a collector’s basement. Each site reframed the object’s meaning. She asks: “Could this object become political if I write a text next to it? Was it considered feminist when shown at the feminist association?” she asks. These questions drive her practice, exploring how meaning shifts with location, context, and institutional power.

In her work, resource circulation is key: taking from one space to empower another, refusing singular narratives of legitimacy. “Now something is shifting,” she adds. “Institutions are censoring, and artists are refusing. Shantout’s work does not offer resolution; it builds through the communal, through resistance, through building with and for her people, while always thinking about the spectator, who is never absent.

Where Shantout’s labour resists through feminist slowness, AlIbrahimi embraces fragility and impermanence, creating works that invite dissolution as an active part of their meaning. In her work, sugar is a recurring material etched into memory, grief, and celebration. In Morocco, sugar is discreet yet omnipresent, accompanying every wedding, visit, and ritual. In her sculptural language, it becomes material, metaphor, and question. Working between Rabat and Paris, her practice moves between installation, sculpture, and audience participation, drawing from Islamic ornament, kitsch aesthetics, feminist art, and oral traditions to examine the intertwined forces of care, ceremony, and control. The installations embrace fragility and transformation. Towers of sugar, silkscreened motifs, and cut-outs of women’s eyes appear monumental yet are designed to collapse, dissolve, or be taken apart by the audience.

My first and recent introduction to AlIbrahimi’s work was through Wedding Garden of Love (2023), a mixed-media sculptural installation composed of Islamic ceramic plates with floral motifs, sugar towers, and cut-outs of women’s make-up eyes. The installation evokes the visual density of Moroccan shops and market stalls filled with sewing materials and fabrics, objects both ornamental and everyday. Some of these materials recall medieval aesthetics; others are unmistakably kitsch, or what she calls “cringe aesthetics.”² Like much of the work, this piece questions the aesthetics and constraints of a woman’s body and her expectations in society. In Moroccan weddings, sugar is typically gifted by the husband’s family, symbolizing purity and hospitality, so this gesture as AlIbrahimi explains to me is suspended, dissected, and deconstructed. The work asks: what are we preserving, and for whom?

Her sculptural process is meditative and deliberately unstable. She begins with raw materials, stacking, dyeing, and assembling them into forms that appear solid but are designed to collapse or decay. “I try to deconstruct what I learned in art school,” she says, “the Western verticality, the permanence.” And: “Sugar can be destroyed at any moment. So how do I invite the audience to be part of that?” Visitors are encouraged to eat or take a piece of the structure, to move or unbalance it, to become participants in its transformation. “How can I claim space in institutions reserved for the masculine?” She asks. Her question is not only about presence, but about method: how can a material and a gesture carry both dissent and care?

AlIbrahimi’s installations carry traces of other feminized spaces. Her work consistently evokes the figure of the bride, adorned, idealized, celebrated in public, yet often reduced to submission in private. In the participatory work Cutting the Sweet Sugar (2024), the structure is performative and fragile. AlIbrahimi does not intervene once the piece is installed; visitors can mend it themselves. The collapse becomes part of the process, mirroring the imbalance she seeks to reveal. “The visitor can feel a warning, a sensation of insecurity. It’s like in the bazaar, you don’t want to touch anything by mistake.” That uncomfortable feeling is what she wants to invoke in the spectator.

Her references and methods form another layered archive. As she explains: “I draw on thinkers such as Asmaa Lamrabet, Houria Abdelouahed, Leïla Tauil, and Fatima Mernissi, whose insights on gender representations in religious texts and postcolonial contexts have shaped my reflections, as well as filmmaker Imane Fakhir, whose documentary on the Moudawana and inheritance laws in Morocco exposes the ‘lion’s share’ inequalities in succession rights. I engage with these voices not for affirmation but to challenge the rules of visibility, legality, and the inheritance of traditions. For me, the intimate revolution begins within, bypassing public affirmation to reform something interior and enduring.” In this framework, sugar becomes a language, not just a substance. She talks about building sculpture by layering sugar and waiting for it to dry. “Some objects I’ve kept for four years haven’t changed colour,” she tells me. “If a part breaks, I just reglue it with eggs. The work lives on.” In her practice, the notion of care isn’t romantic, it is technical, physical, sometimes sticky.

In her current phase, she’s moving away from geometric forms and experimenting with sugar powder, silkscreen printing on surfaces, and developing her own molds. She’s also collaborating with a hennaya (henna artist), testing how henna can be printed on sugar without melting or silkscreened onto edible forms. She’s collecting a visual archive of bridal images, henna motifs, and Islamic designs, some found online, others passed through family stories. These references are neither nostalgic nor purely symbolic; they are activated. “I try not to be alone in this work,” she says. “This emancipation makes the horizon widen.”

Conclusion

When we look at the 1999 edited volume Contemporary Arab Women’s Art, compiled by Fran Lloyd, Salwa Mikdadi, and others, it mapped artistic productions and support systems that sustained Arab art during the late 20th century. The depth of engagement documented in this work remains significant. With that framework, more than two decades later, a new generation of contemporary artists has emerged, continuing, unsettling, and reimagining Arab art discourse within the region. My initial working title for this cluster, A Tale Makes a Turn: Feminist Legacies, served as a framework for this chapter, tracing historical and visual connections shaped by women artists, those who turned to poetry, film, grassroots organizing, and art spaces as tools of resistance. In writing about these four artists, my methodology draws upon Margot Badran’s scholarship on Arab women’s emancipation, Fran Lloyd’s postcolonial analyses, Salwa Mikdadi’s extensive documentation of contemporary art voices, and the politics of care articulated by Nawal El Saadawi and bell hooks.³ Historically, artists like Inji Efflatoun and Safia Farhat, and more recently Thuraya Al-Baqsami, and Samia Halabi have shown how feminist visual strategies can carry solidarity and care across borders, with textile, design, and abstraction echoing creativity and social struggles from Southern Lebanon to North Africa. My mapping of the artists’ practices grew through interviews, conversations, studio visits, and email exchanges. This curated cluster takes shape as a book chapter rather than an exhibition.

The artistic practices of Cindy Chehab, Nour Shantout, Maïssane AlIbrahimi, and Huda Takriti collectively demonstrate how stories are carried forward as continually renewed bodies. Each artist reanimates fragments of memory, ritual, and material, emphasizing that history and lived experiences are constructed through relationships, gestures, and acts of care rather than preserved in silence. Their works recover marginalized voices and engage with potential futures. This continuity is characterized by renewal rather than repetition, underscoring that survival and solidarity function as imaginative acts.

Footnotes1        Rooted in the MENA region and shaped by a return to historical knowledge and tools, not only to understand the present but to imagine through it. From recent government shifts in Syria, to the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine, to reforms in Moroccan laws regarding marriage, to Lebanon’s deepening crisis, these realities bear the marks of imperial and settler-colonial logics of instability.
2        In my interview with her, AlIbrahimi references The New Age of Kitsch: An Essay on the Civilization of "Too Much", Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy as a framework to rethink visual pleasure and its political implications. This orientation goes against the white cube, masculinity, and coloniality, embedding camouflage and memory in plain sight.
3        For more see Badran, M. (1995). Feminists, Islam and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Princeton University Press: New Jersey. And Lloyd, F. (Ed). (1999). Contemporary Arab Women’s Art: Dialogues of the Present. I.B. Tauris, NY.

Lina Ramadan is a curator and writer specializing in contemporary and modern Arab art, currently based in Vienna. Her research focuses on post-colonial MENA, women artists, and solidarities. From 2016 to 2022, she served as a curator at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha. Ramadan is the recipient of the 2024-25 Darat al Funun Fellowship, and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.