How shall we greet the sun

“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.” ― Edward W. Said

How shall we greet the sun (ongoing) explores the personal narratives and complex emotional landscape of the lives of a small group of young women living in exile in the Netherlands. Many of these women, including Thana Faroq are in phases in life where they are challenged to construct identities within new cultural contexts and geographies of power, as well as within their memories and the nostalgic representations of the past they possess. The artist’s goal is to explore the emotional interior landscape in light of the changes that the women, including herself, go through, shaping their sense of belonging both in the countries of origin and the Netherlands. She creates a memory archive of feelings that are often lost in histories of migration and displacement, including nostalgia, loneliness, anger, happiness, joy or not feeling much at all.

Thana Faroq experiments with the textuality and the physicality of the photograph itself as forms of resistance. She often engages women she photographs and their children with the photographs and provides a space for them to interpret my visuals. The point of Faroq’s photographic production comes from a place of deep understanding of empathy and carnal experience. How shall we greet the sun responds to questions: How do women in exile cope with their emotions in the process of constructing a new identity? How does the changed social and familial context lead to new ways of managing novel emotional experiences? How can we explore this complex interior emotional landscape in a visual way?