Amber Hammad Self-portrait of a middle-class, middle-aged migrant Muslim artist, caught in a wayward existentialist moment

Through my creative practice, I investigate and encourage new conversations around the complexities of being a middle-class, middle-aged Muslim migrant Pakistani–Australian artist. I try to challenge and reimagine the visibility and invisibility, representation and misrepresentation, and veiling and unveiling of Muslim female bodies within the Islamophobic West (where I now live), as well as Islamised patriarchal cultures (where I come from). Advancing ideas of feminist willfulness (which build on Sara Ahmed’s book Living a feminist life) in this self-portrait, I celebrate some of the clichés associated with my identity such as headscarves, miniature painting, truck art, Arabic script (a Sufi quote about not knowing oneself) and cricket.

Amber Hammad, 2022