Clench Your Fists (2020)

A foundfootage collage video that explores the process of growing up in an Arab family deeply affected by death and grief Using footage from the Lebanese film In the Battlefields as well as Candy and The 100 and audio from archival recorded Lebanese funeral laments the video looks at how men and women express grief and anger under the patriarchy as well as how trauma and childhood experiences can evolve into mental illness and patterns of behaviour as adults Clench My Fists is part of a larger body of work dealing with racial identity and the concept of inherited grief that through biological or behavioural means trauma is passed down through prospective family generations so that family members might experience the residual effects of trauma they did not personally witness This body of work explores how the death of the artists grandfather an Arab American caused ripples of mental illness and skewed racial identity through her paternal family