The Spot originates from archival footage created during a collaborative project with artist Shero Abbas in 2015. It also forms part of a broader research investigation into the lives and struggles of women in Iraqi Kurdistan.

In this piece, I reframe the archival material through a new medium, using it to interrogate the silencing, marginalization, and systemic abuse of women, often buried beneath layers of cultural norms and societal stereotypes. The work is a response to the repeated suppression, erasure, or distortion of women’s stories.

The video focuses solely on women’s hands, presented as honest, expressive, and revealing. As filmmaker Harun Farocki once noted, hands can betray the mind and tell truths that words cannot. In this spirit, the hands become silent narrators, revealing a depth of experience that cannot be spoken but can be felt.

The Spot is both a visual experiment and a political gesture, an attempt to reclaim space for voices that have long been denied, through the quiet yet powerful language of gesture.