This is Episode 6, and our guest is the meticulous and evocative Thana Faroq. Faroq is an award-winning Yemeni photographer, writer, and educator currently based in the Netherlands. She was born and raised in Yemen until the age of 17 when she traveled to Canada and the US for her undergraduate studies.
Her recent book, “How Shall We Greet the Sun?”, explores the personal stories and complex emotional lives of a small group of young women refugees living in the Netherlands, including Thana. It reflects on their shared and individual journeys, casting an eye toward both tangible and metaphorical futures. Many of them are at a point in life where they are navigating the formation of new identities—shaped by new cultural contexts, power dynamics, memories, and nostalgia for the past.
Thana Faroq offers a visual and textual exploration of how the identities of this generation of women migrants in the Netherlands are continuously built and reshaped by their current circumstances and the homes they left behind.
She speaks with our resident interviewer, Habib William Kherbek, about her working processes, starting with a sentence and crafting short sentences, followed by the photography that arises from them. She discusses working intuitively and allowing for mistakes and imperfections and finding joy in the process.
She discusses the role of the creative process in the healing journey and conveying conflicting emotions. Her work explores the challenge of depicting in pictures the feelings of homesickness and loneliness, as well as the struggle to integrate into a new culture as a female refugee. She navigates the formation of new identities and the nostalgia for the past.
Thana currently teaches at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (KABK). She received the inaugural Open Society Foundation Fellowship Grant in 2018 and the Arab Documentary Fund, supported by the Prince Claus Fund and Magnum Foundation, in 2019. In 2020, she was recognized as ‘One to Watch’ by the British Journal of Photography. She also won the PhotoWien Photo Book Award in 2021 for her first book, “I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows.”
We at Creatrix magazine are delighted to feature her in this week’s episode.
