Biography
Amira Al Awadhi, born in 1994 in Dubai, currently lives in Sharjah, UAE, and is an analog photographer. Her theme deals with her insecurities, social judgment and her way of dealing with it and getting over it.
Al Awadhi’s art background started with graphite portrait drawings and acrylic paintings, and only started taking pictures in 2014. Her love for this medium comes from her love for the darkroom where she develops her own film–a process that she loves because of its tangibility and its magic-like results.
Her first series, ICEBERG, won the International Emerging Artist Award for the photography category in 2016, and got shortlisted for ADMAF’s Creativity Award 2016. It was also showcased in the Greenville Museum of Fine Art, Greenville, NC, USA in February 2016.
Artist Statement:
My analog photography series deals with the levels and the depth of a person’s personality, using self-portraits. My work mainly revolves around issues of insecurities, social judgement and self-confidence. So I create obscured, layered and prominently dark self-portraits, where if I’m not hiding behind a camera then I’m hiding behind another image of myself.
No Photoshop or any form of digital manipulation is used to produce the final image, which is something I take pride in. I believe that it is my background in drawing that still pushes me to work with my hands during the whole complicated process of film developing. As my work has progressed I have felt myself growing braver, personally and artistically, and therefore I am more comfortable with my self-portraits being the subject of my art, but nonetheless, I still feel myself shying away from the public eye and that’s why I find myself covering and layering the images until they become somehow unrecognizable as me. The back and forth process of covering and revealing has given me the authority and control not only over my work, but also over my self-image.
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