honorable mention
Bilo Hussein united states
title
Never Home
An on going project driven by the sense of segregation in religion, culture and gender that I experienced as a child in Saudi Arabia, as well as the wish to find a place I can fit in regardless of belief.
As a third culture individual, I often wonder if home is the place where you physically spent the most of your life? Is it a place you feel you belong to? Or is simply a country that you are a citizen of?
I pick up a camera and use it to connect with people I had previously not been able allowed to accept. Rather than understanding myself, I turned to my subjects, females such as myself who had recently moved to New York City from a different background than my own.
The “layers” I incorporate into these images after shooting the portraits themselves are meant to evoke the very thoughts and feelings of my subjects. These layers consist of places and patterns I have fallen in love with since my move to New York City. In fact sense, these “internal” images represent the process of coming to accept a new culture as one’s own. But they are also saying that inside each displaced one is an abundance of emotion, thought and experience that in many is cultures is never allowed to come out.
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entry description
When I was growing up in Saudi Arabia, my Sudanese parents often reminded me that this county was not our home. It was only years later that I understood the implications of this – that it might become impossible for me to ‘belong’ to any culture and that there was no place I could comfortably call home. These grown up feelings are the basis for Never Home.An on going project driven by the sense of segregation in religion, culture and gender that I experienced as a child in Saudi Arabia, as well as the wish to find a place I can fit in regardless of belief.
As a third culture individual, I often wonder if home is the place where you physically spent the most of your life? Is it a place you feel you belong to? Or is simply a country that you are a citizen of?
I pick up a camera and use it to connect with people I had previously not been able allowed to accept. Rather than understanding myself, I turned to my subjects, females such as myself who had recently moved to New York City from a different background than my own.
The “layers” I incorporate into these images after shooting the portraits themselves are meant to evoke the very thoughts and feelings of my subjects. These layers consist of places and patterns I have fallen in love with since my move to New York City. In fact sense, these “internal” images represent the process of coming to accept a new culture as one’s own. But they are also saying that inside each displaced one is an abundance of emotion, thought and experience that in many is cultures is never allowed to come out.
about the photographer
Bilo Hussein (b.1981) photographic practice has developed from a recreational background from her time in London. Her photographs were a mean to document the time she spent away from her native home, Egypt. She was experimenting with new media and finding ways to break the fear of being in new surroundings. Her passion and visual ambition were crippled by lack of needed skills. She sought proper training at London School of Photography and later earned a Masters of Professional Studies in Digital Photography from School of Visual Arts in New York. In line with her idea of the importance of new media, she is an avid user of social media networks and utilizes it as a platform to share her art with the world, breaking boundaries that were set by gatekeepers and geographical distance. Her work was exhibited in a group show, Natural Selection in New York last February. She was also selected to receive the SVA Thesis Scholarship Award for 2014.back to gallery