Unchilding (Ahmed Manasra block), 2023. Resin, glass marble. Prototype for a larger installation on Palestinian children in Israeli prisons. Part of achieving clarity in the epoxy resin was getting help from artist educator Majd Alloush.

agar study, 2025
Below is an agar prototype with embedded glass marbles developed as part of the material research for Unchilding. The study explores transparency, light transmission, scale, and the suspension of ordinary objects of play. It documents the project’s development from biodegradable testing phases toward the final bio-epoxy installation.

Forty-three resin building blocks hold marbles for the Palestinian childhoods frozen in motion. As of May 2023, 170 children between the ages of 14 and 17 are held in prison, in an egregious breach of human rights and international law worldwide. The occupiers of Palestine are the only country in the world to hold children in prison. This is a full, illegal breach of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child.20 Children, mostly boys, are arrested by their country’s occupiers in order to be deterred from activism and to stunt future generations of resistance and development. Zionist military courts try children as young as 12, and keep them in arbitrary detention until they are of legal age to be imprisoned, as was the case with Ahmed Manasra. Boys become men in prison, and Palestinian society lives with a series of amputated limbs. Children are also placed under house arrest by the Zionist forces, parents become stand-in prison guards and the family home becomes a prison cell.21 In this work, the children are suspended marbles and the resin building blocks are pawns in a wider political game.

The block with a sole marble is made in tribute to Ahmed Manasra, who has been in solitary conThe United Nations General Assembly Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners were revised in 2015 to extend restrictions on solitary confinement since November 2021, when he was 19. The United Nations General Assembly Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners were revised in 2015 to extend restrictions on solitary confinement exceeding 15 days. Ahmed has been alone in a jail cell for years, not days, and has developed schizophrenia as a result of this and compounded traumas inflicted by Zionist settlers and armed forces.

Exhibited in Synthesis NYU Masters Thesis Exhibition at 421 Campus – May 2023 in Abu Dhabi, UAE

Womb Amulets
9 x 9 cm; sequence of 29
Stoneware, paper, hand-knotted rope from hand-dyed iron oxide cotton

I have made 29 stitched clay amulets for each of the Palestinian women imprisoned in illegal occupier prisons as of January 2023. The amulets are made from pink stoneware and are abstracted wombs. Carved on the insides of the wombs are a series of letters and numbers; they have been inserted with pieces of paper, to mimic ancient spell-binding rituals for protection from Palestine and surrounding regions. Each amulet contains one of the names of the prisoners, who I aim to pray for and protect by not publicly exhibiting their names. I tried many different stitches and threads including embroidery thread, yarn, and bookbinding thread, before settling on binding these works with iron-oxide dyed and hand-knotted thread. In the end, I chose to create something that looked like it was of the flesh, perhaps like intestines.

Palestinian women held in occupier prisons are likely to be subjected to gender-based violence and threats of sexual molestation. They are robbed of basic rights and privacies such as the right to change their menstrual pads or privacy from male prison guards. This means that political prisoners who wear hijab must keep them on at all times of day and often develop alopecia and skin conditions as a result. Although female political prisoners are less often subjected to positional torture as male prisoners are, pregnant political prisoners are cuffed to hospital beds by their hands and feet while giving birth. Newborns stay in prison for 2 years with their mother and stand count when prisoners are rounded up and counted. Many of the children born in occupier prisons develop trauma from male voices. This is a prime example of “the exposure of Palestinians to chronic trauma; that is, trauma that repeatedly occurs," as stated by Lindsey Moore and Ahmed Qabaha. [Moore, L., & Qabaha, A. (2015). Chronic trauma, (post)colonial Chronotopes and Palestinian lives: Omar Robert Hamilton’s though I know the river is dry/ma’a Anni A’rif Anna al-Nahr Qad Jaf. Postcolonial Traumas, 14–29. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526434_2.]

Adding complexity to the situation of female political prisoners is their return to Palestinian society after their release, whereby the shame associated with their imprisonment is much higher than it is for their male counterparts. I threaded some of these amulets together as I considered the sisterhood that results from gender-based oppression. The threads are knotted together by a knot that is used for friendship bracelets (forward-backward hitch knot) and are made of muslin, which is a fabric used for making patterns when cutting out the pieces of a sewn garment. The fabric is dyed with iron oxide, which is a pigment extracted from red earth and symbolizes safety; it is a form of protection from the sun’s radiation, as it was the first known sunblock to be used by humans.

Exhibited in SILA: All That is Left to You at Maraya Art Center – September 2025 in Sharjah, UAE 

Exhibited in I Can No Longer Produce the Limits of My Own Body at NIKA Project Space – November 2023 in Dubai, UAE 

Exhibited in Synthesis NYU Masters Thesis Exhibition at 421 Campus – May 2023 in Abu Dhabi, UAE

King Cyrus of Persia or ‘Cyrus the Great’ is credited with writing the first human rights charter, which he had inscribed on a stone cylinder and placed as a foundation stone of a main temple when he conquered Babylon in the 6th century BC. In this project, I use a 3D printer and sandstone to recreate the cylinder – which in its modern iteration is inscribed with the Wikipedia entry for The Avenues Mall in Kuwait, translated into cuneiform.

Writes Robert Kluijver, who commissioned the piece, "The artist has translated trite yet trending topics and promotional material from Gulf social media directly onto 3D printed ‘stone’ in ancient Arabian script with the hope of reviving interest and investment in the Middle East’s ancient past. These new inscriptions go directly from the printer into a museum display case, as a commentary on how slowly the ethics and values of world civilization have evolved, despite huge leaps in technology."

Commissioned for the Crisis of History exhibition
curated by Robert Kluijver for Framers Framed and Tolhuistuin – March 2015, Amsterdam, The Netherlands