5 Somali Artists And Writers On How Surveillance Culture Shapes Their Work

[Deeq A.]

I spoke with five Somali artists about this very issue. All of the women I spoke with flirt with someone else's gaze, whether that be the gaze of their own communities, the male gaze, or the white gaze; these are gazes that fetishize, and they respond to them in their own ways. If these women are not archiving, documenting, and facilitating discourse, they are curating magazines and online publications. These Somali women are proactive in their own representation and hail from different backgrounds and are interested in different types of artistic expression, but underlying their creations is the daunting reality of both external and internal surveillance.

Source: Hiiraan Online