SALMA REFASS
Installation
Date: 2025
Photography
On timely grief
Sherman gave me language before I had lived enough to know what I’d need it for. That language returned to me through the smoke and silence of grief. Like their work, grief, I came to understand, is a character.
A shape-shifter. A performance.
You don’t always feel it when it first arrives—you learn to act it, to put on its face. You stage it for others. In the theatre of mourning, you become the main character, where the lighting is always off balance and the audience doesn’t clap. Sherman’s photographs—so often misread as self-portraits—are, in fact, portraits of the masks we wear to be believed. Ain’t grief just that? The mask you and I try on in the mirror before stepping out into the world? A performance requested by the unknown crowd, to be permormed just right, or else…
I do not cry. I wear grief. I dress it. I cast it. I become it. I smear eyeliner that never fully runs. I sit in poses too composed to be accidental. I do not aim for realism—I aim for recognition. Because grief is performative not in the sense of faking, but in that of ritual. It is costume and choreography. An inheritance we enact. Some griefs I’ve lived. Others, I’ve absorbed from stories, from the shapes of people I've loved, from collective mourning gifted to me like an heirloom. Maybe the truest version of something we know too well to name.
Two decades later, my mind remains haunted by her, the woman looking back in some of her stills. Not crying—but almost. Not broken—but almost. A woman on the brink of something—loss, realization, abandonment. Each photograph could be a study in pre-grief, in something like the suspended possibility of rupture. A vibration so high, a muffled scream of something unknown.
Grief as performance. Grief as cinema. Grief as drag. Grief as self-portrait.
Makers of beauty
Photo series
Country: Kenya
Date: 2025
Photography
With their bare hands they excavate the beauty potential that exists at the heart of the ebony and mpingo trunks.
Trials
Country: Morocco
Date: 2023
Photography
Self reflection
The Self Project (extract 1)
Date: 2022
Photography
One cannot delve into art making without having transperced the thousands of layers between them and themselves. This autoportraiture series is an attempt at that. Where the work began.
Our work is nothing but us. Our selves reflected in every inch of what we make. We lie when we say it is about anything else. It is self-centered, we are nombrilistic not because we want to but because that is simply the nature of art making. Our eye is looking for the reflection of us in every subject. In self-portraiture, we do not lie: it is simply and plainly about us.
Avedon, Cindy Sherman, Joan Didion, Francis Bacon all said it, when, through their individual mediums, in attempts to run away from themselves, they could only find themselves.
I Will Breathe
A multi-media project in the works.
Date: 2023 - Today
Photography, mixed media paintings, text.
The Self Project (extract 2)
Date: 2022
Photography, Acrylic on paper