We are pleased to interview Hayat, a Lebanese multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves fluidly across photography, video, installation, and writing. Now based in Dubai, her work explores the delicate tension between personal memory and collective experience, examining how identity is shaped by geography, social structures, and the quiet complexities of human presence.
Rooted in both observation and lived experience, Hayat’s work is marked by poetic restraint and emotional precision. Through stillness, atmosphere, and free verse, she creates spaces where fragility, displacement, and intimacy can exist without resolution. Her imagery holds a quiet intensity, where shadows, pauses, and subtle gestures reveal deeper psychological and social landscapes.
Drawing from the contrasting rhythms of Beirut and Dubai, her practice reflects on belonging, rupture, and the invisible forces that shape both bodies and environments. Whether through image or language, Hayat approaches art as a form of inquiry, one that resists simplification and remains open to ambiguity.
In this conversation, we discuss medium as emotional structure, the role of vulnerability in contemporary practice, and how atmosphere, memory, and displacement continue to shape her evolving visual language.
Your practice moves fluidly across photography, video, installation and writing. How do you decide which medium best carries a particular idea or emotional state?
I rarely begin by choosing a medium intellectually. The work tends to indicate its own form through rhythm. Some ideas arrive as images: sudden, self-contained, almost silent. Others resist stillness and require duration, movement, or space. There are emotional states that cannot exist within a single frame; they unfold through time, through repetition, through what shifts almost imperceptibly.
Photography often holds tension most precisely. It preserves a suspended moment without resolving it. Video allows for breath, hesitation, and the slow accumulation of feeling. Writing enters when neither image nor movement can carry the interior weight of something, when language becomes necessary not to explain, but to remain close to what resists form. Installation extends this further by asking the body to enter the work rather than observe it.
The decision is not strategic. It is a matter of listening: understanding whether something requires compression or expansion, silence or sound, distance or immersion. Each medium carries its own ethics, its own way of holding fragility and ambiguity. I follow the one that feels most faithful to the emotional structure of the work.
Your work often explores solitary yet coexisting narratives shaped by social structures and identity. What first drew you to this tension between the individual and the collective?
That tension felt immediate to me early on, the sense that we are deeply singular, yet never separate from the structures that shape us. Even our most private emotions are informed by forces beyond us: family, language, gender, class, history, expectation. I became interested in the space where an intimate gesture can reveal a larger system.
What stays with me is how a person can carry entire worlds within them while being continuously shaped by worlds outside of them. A body in a room is never just a body in a room. It carries inherited codes, permissions, restraints, absences. My work returns to that intersection, the individual not as a fixed subject, but as a site where multiple forces converge.
Perhaps this also comes from living within tension. Places marked by contradiction, interruption, and negotiation. In such contexts, identity is never stable. It is formed in relation to systems, to displacement, to the gaze of others, to what is remembered and what is erased. That complexity feels inexhaustible to me.
There is a poetic undercurrent in your work, particularly in your use of text and free verse. How does language function alongside image in your practice?
Language enters when the image reaches its threshold, when it can suggest something but cannot fully articulate the texture of an inner state. Text does not arrive to stabilise meaning; it functions as another register of perception. At times it runs parallel to the image; at others, it interrupts or deepens the silence around it.
I am drawn to free verse because it resists closure. It allows thought to remain porous, unfinished, closer to how memory and emotion actually move. Image and language, for me, are not separate. They emerge from the same impulse: to stay with something that does not resolve easily.
Restraint matters in both. I avoid language that over-explains, just as I avoid images that become overly declarative. When they work together, they create a kind of echo rather than a conclusion. Something unstable, intimate, and open.
You’ve described your work as emerging from lived experience as much as observation. How do personal memory and environment shape your visual language?
Memory shapes my work less through subject than through sensibility: how I frame, what I notice, what I return to, what I omit. Long before intention, memory teaches a way of seeing. The textures we grow up with, the quality of light we associate with safety or estrangement, the emotional charge of certain spaces, all of this enters the work almost unconsciously.
Place, for me, is never a backdrop; it organizes perception. It affects pace, posture, and distance. Some environments produce stillness; others sharpen fragmentation or create dissonance. I am drawn to thresholds, shadows, blurred movement, things that carry time rather than simply depict form.
I work from what lingers rather than what announces itself. Often, I am responding to atmospheres I have absorbed over years: Beirut’s density and interruption, Dubai’s speed and controlled surfaces. These are not just locations but conditions that shape how I understand presence and absence. The work emerges from that.
Being Lebanese and now based in Dubai, how do shifting geographies inform your sense of identity and creative perspective?
Shifting geographies have made identity feel less fixed and more relational. Being Lebanese is not only an origin; it is a way of carrying history in the body: its tenderness, volatility, and fragmentation. Living in Dubai places that sensibility within a very different structure of time and space. The contrast is not only visual; it is existential.
Beirut moves with interruption, memory, and improvisation. Dubai often moves with acceleration, control, and projection. Moving between them has sharpened my attention to what is concealed beneath efficiency, beneath beauty, beneath nostalgia. It has also complicated belonging in ways that feel generative.
Displacement, even in subtle forms, alters perception. It heightens awareness of codes, distances, and social textures. I find myself observing more closely, what is visible, what is withheld, what is performed. The work is shaped by this ongoing negotiation between places, not as opposites, but as overlapping conditions.
Your work feels both introspective and socially aware. Do you see your practice as a form of documentation, reflection, or something more speculative?
The work exists somewhere between documentation, reflection, and speculation, but not fully within any of them. I am interested in reality, though not only in its surface. Documentation can imply that what is visible is sufficient, and I don’t believe it is. Reflection allows me to stay with how something feels, how it reverberates. Speculation opens space for what might exist beyond what is given.
The images may begin from real spaces or bodies, but they are not attempts to record them. I am drawn to what they imply: the emotional residue of structures, the quiet violence embedded in certain norms, the fractures within ordinary life. At the same time, I remain attentive to fragile possibilities for connection.
Perhaps it is closer to a form of inquiry: one that holds evidence and ambiguity simultaneously able to bear witness without becoming didactic, and to remain open without losing precision.
There is often a sense of stillness or quiet tension in your imagery. What role does atmosphere play in constructing meaning within your work?
Atmosphere is not an addition to the work; it is where meaning forms. What an image holds is often not narrative clarity, but an emotional climate. A shadow, a pause, a blurred figure, these can carry more weight than explicit action.
Stillness, for me, is rarely empty. It is where tension becomes most legible. A quiet image can hold pressure, grief, distance, or tenderness without forcing resolution. Atmosphere allows these states to coexist without collapsing into a single reading.
This is why I pay close attention to light, texture, and spatial relation. They shape the psychological temperature of the image. Atmosphere determines how a viewer enters, how long they remain, and what kind of intimacy becomes possible.
Can you talk about your process – do your works begin with a clear concept, or do they evolve intuitively over time?
The process moves between clarity and intuition. Some works begin with a defined conceptual tension; others with a fragment. A line, an image, a sensation that insists. Even when the starting point is clear, I resist resolving it too quickly.
The work develops through accumulation: looking, waiting, returning, discarding… allowing relationships to emerge over time. Meaning often appears later, once I understand what continues to insist.
I trust slowness. I trust repetition. The process is neither entirely intuitive nor entirely structured; it is an ongoing negotiation between control and surrender.
In a world saturated with imagery, what do you feel is the responsibility of the artist today?
In a world saturated with images, the risk is not only excess but indifference. Images circulate at a speed that can strip them of depth and consequence. The responsibility of the artist, as I see it, is to resist that, to create work that restores attention.
This does not require overt statements, but it does demand awareness. What does it mean to represent a body, a place, a moment? What does it mean to aestheticise intimacy, pain, or loss? These questions shape how I approach the image.
There is also value in protecting ambiguity and complexity in a culture that constantly flattens them. Not everything needs to resolve. Sometimes the responsibility is simply to create conditions in which something can be felt more honestly.
How do you approach vulnerability in your work – both personally and in how it is received by an audience?
Vulnerability, for me, is not exposure for its own sake. It becomes meaningful only when it leads to precision, when it allows something to be expressed in a way that feels exact rather than dramatic.
That often means staying close to what is difficult to hold: ambiguity, tenderness, contradiction. At the same time, vulnerability requires form. Without it, it risks becoming raw without being communicative.
Once the work is released, it no longer belongs solely to me. It is read through other people’s histories and sensitivities. I try to accept that. Vulnerability is not about controlling interpretation; it is about allowing the work to remain open enough for others to enter.
Are there particular artists, writers or cultural influences that have shaped your thinking or aesthetic direction?
I have been shaped by artists and writers who treat silence, fragmentation, and atmosphere as meaningful structures. Filmmakers like Tarkovsky have influenced how I think about time and memory, while writers such as Etel Adnan, Ocean Vuong, Aja Monet, Inger Christensen, and Constance Debré have shaped my relationship to language.
I am drawn to work that holds intimacy and severity together, work that remains emotionally precise without becoming sentimental. Influence, for me, is not only formal. It comes from environments, from language, from lived experience, from everyday gestures and tensions.
It is less about reference than about sensitivity: how one learns to feel an image before analyzing it.
What does “connection” mean to you within your practice – between people, places, or internal states?
Connection, to me, is rarely immediate or complete. It often appears through distance, through tension, through what cannot fully be bridged. I am drawn to quieter forms of connection: the emotional residue between people, the way a place lives inside a body, the way separate lives echo one another.
In my work, connection is less about harmony than about resonance. Not agreement, but a shared vibration, something that touches another person without needing to be fully understood.
Looking ahead, are there new mediums, themes or collaborations you feel drawn to explore?
I am increasingly drawn to work that moves beyond the single image into more immersive forms: installation, moving image, sound, and spatial arrangements that shift the viewer from observer to participant.
Thematically, I remain engaged with memory, identity, and social structures, but I want to push further into inheritance, rupture, female interiority, and the emotional architecture of place. I am particularly interested in how histories are carried through gesture, material, and repetition.
I am also moving toward collaboration, especially where different sensory languages meet. Work that introduces friction rather than cohesion tends to be the most generative. More and more, I am interested in building something porous, work that moves across forms without losing intimacy.
