Where are you from?
"Where are you from?"
It's a question I've been asked my whole life, and I've never quite had a clean answer.
As someone originally Palestinian, born in Amman, a Canadian citizen who grew up in Bahrain and has since lived in nine cities across the world, that question has followed me everywhere. It has always placed me in a box that never quite fit.
As an artist and interior designer, my work lives at the intersection of art and design.
My paintings are what happen when you try to hold all of those places at once. I paint the way cities work… in fragments, layers, traces of what was there before.
The interior design is the same obsession with the question, explored with a different vocabulary. The canvas turns into space, paint into materiality.
My sister was two years old when my parents moved to Riyadh. She was unsettled the way small children are when nothing quite feels familiar. Then a circular rug arrived from Amman, and when that was placed in the room, almost like magic, she settled down. A familiar object in an unfamiliar place. It was enough.
I've thought about that a lot, about how much of what we call belonging is actually traces. The presence of something that carries where you came from.
When I reflect back on my life and work and connect the dots, one vivid memory surfaces before everything else.
It was the summer of 1995. My parents took us to Palestine to visit my grandmother. I was a teenager, equal parts curious and indifferent. What had happened in 1948 felt like history. It felt like it belonged to someone else's story.
We stood across the street from the house she had been forced to leave. It was occupied now. My grandmother, strong and rarely emotional, crumbled to the ground.
I'd never seen her like that.
It wasn't about politics, or history, or real estate. It was about identity. About what it feels like to be separated from the place that holds your sense of self.
That moment changed something in me. And whether I knew it then or not, it set the tone for everything that came later.
Nine cities followed. The question "where are you from?" came with me to all of them. I collected places without ever quite belonging to any single one, and at some point I stopped trying to answer the question cleanly and started trying to understand why it mattered so much.
Fast forward to sometime in 2017. Late at night, in a small studio I'd rented in Dubai, I wrote the words "In habitat."
I didn't know exactly what it would become. What I knew was the feeling of it: a practice at the intersection of art and interiors, built around the idea that how you inhabit a space is a form of self-knowledge.
After years of being asked that question, I've stopped expecting geography to answer it.
What I wanted to make possible was PAUSE. Not escape, or decoration. Meals that go on too long. Mornings that aren't rushed. The quiet reassurance of a space that actually fits you.
My paintings invite the same thing. You can stand in front of one for a long time and keep finding more.
The vision is a quiet one. A practice that stays precise, that works with people living at full stretch, across countries and identities and time zones, who want their homes to reflect something honest about who they are. Not a showroom, but a place that's genuinely theirs.
Somewhere the question finally has an answer.
