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Olouj - علوج (2025). (Work in progress)

This work consists of a series of temporary tattoo skins peeled from the artist’s body and placed on sheets on paper. It links the artist’s childhood experiences to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As a child, her encounters with American soldiers ranged from wittnessing thier acts of violence to moments in which they handed out candy or bubble gum that sometimes came with temporary tattoos.

The images used for these tattoos are drawn from an ongoing collection of 44,000 photographs the artist gathered by tracking American soldiers online and gathering images they took during the invasion of Iraq. While still in the process of sorting and categorizing this archive, the artist selected images of soldiers posing and flexing their muscles inside military camps to reproduce as temporary tattoos.