riis beach
In this series, I set about capturing an alternate experience of Riis beach—one informed by its history as a QTPOC space that runs geographically and metaphorically parallel to the one of the adjacent abandoned Neponsit hospital. I conflate the latter’s history as a site of containment for physical illness with the historical process of ostracizing queerness and treating it as an ailment to be cured.
The deliberate act of obscuring and absenting human presence from these images acts here as a commentary on both the literal and metaphorical violence enacted upon QTPOC bodies, and their erasure from the mainstream due to negative intersectionality that the community has to contend with. Ultimately, I envision these images as fulfilling a dual function: a personal one of exorcising my trauma and the erasure of my queer identity while growing up in the Arab world, and a wider one of generating a presence by highlighting the erasure of QTPOC bodies in my images.
