BENGALURU: Ibtisam travelled between UAE and India during her mid teens until four years ago when she moved to Bengaluru to pursue her BA in Economics, Sociology, and Indian History. “I have been an artist at heart for as long as I can remember,” says the African American artist.
Her recent project for Gender Bender received a grant from Sandbox Collective and Goethe Institut. It involves a painting where she explores and presents the lives of women and members of the LGBTQ community in the Middle Eastern society and culture.
The fine art mural painting explores the nuanced roles of women in their relationship to men — therefore the world — and the LGBTQIA. “It creates a visual comparison between their historical and modern day world experiences,” says the 22-year-old.A lot of research was necessary to avoid harmful stereotypes in the project, says Ibtisam. “I wanted to create this painting to get a deeper insight into historical aspects of a society to try and make sense of my personal experiences within this specific regional framework,” she adds. The title of her piece is ‘Al Awra- The Intimate Parts’. As Ibitsam grew older she began to recognise how important it was for women to conceal and hide, like there was shame attached to having a vagina, or being a female. “Of course it’s already sheltered and veiled in/from society, and I guess I consider the title as a metaphoric representation of the complex and intimate vulnerabilities, some of which I lay bare and expose in this piece,” she explains.
Being gay and living in a middle eastern culture is a dangerous combination, she notes, adding that homosexuality is illegal in the region. Among other challenges that women from the region face, one would be the lack of vocabulary to express who or what you are. “You can express being attracted to a woman but there is no word for lesbian,” she says. Language is a crucial form of expression and communication, and not having words in one’s native language to describe oneself, causes them to question the validity of their feelings, she adds. “And with the limited or censored access to visibility of gay women in gay relationships portrayed in media, literature, film and music, it adds considerably to the complexities of their identities,” she says.
‘Make cinema, literature diverse’
Ibitsam hopes that her piece will inspire women and people pertaining to the LGBTQIA community in the Middle East and otherwise to have the courage to speak of and own their experiences good or bad. The majority of what we consume from cinema to literature to general media, is from a heterosexual male’s world perception, she says. “I look forward to living in a world that is rich with nuanced variations of narrative experiences; unique because they are expressed and shared directly from the lips of those who lived them”, she adds.