Protesting Empire in Yemeni American Visual Art

• In Event: Contested Belongings: Arab Diasporas and Western Expatriates in the Shadow of Empire

Abstract

The paper examines the aesthetics of witnessing and grieving in Yemeni American visual art created in response to the US violations of Yemeni lands, lives, and rights. The primary sources of analysis are the mixed-media artworks of Yemeni American female artists Asiya Al-Sharabi’s “Trumperie” (2016-2017), Alia Ali’s “Under Thread” (2019), and Yasmine Diaz’s “Echoes of Invisible Hearts” (2018-2019). Such creative installations demonstrate how visual art and advocacy intersect to shape narratives, foster consciousness of one’s community struggles, and challenge power structures.

A total of nine self-portraits in enlarged passport-style photos, Al-Sharabi’s “Trumperie” features the artist dressed in inherited Yemeni clothes and accessories in what appears to be a Yemeni passport platform where consular stamps are mixed with imposed scripts that read variously as “Rejected,” “Denied,” “Deported,” “Visa Application Denied,” “Visa Rejected.” The artwork invites viewers to witness the human cost of President Trump’s Muslim travel ban—the shattered dreams, the fractured connections, and the resilience of those affected. Ali’s “Under Thread” offers a series of black-and-white auto-portraits depicting the artist herself in various stages of being unwrapped from a tight white thread. The thread symbolizes the artist's critique of the US involvement in Yemen’s civil war since 2014. The unwrapping process is a metaphor for Ali’s search for clarity amidst the fog of war and her defiance against US-based institutional silencing and complicity. Equally important, in her “On Echoes of Invisible Hearts,” Diaz offers three mixed-media collages that mediate the artist’s critical view of US media coverage, or lack thereof, of Yemen’s warring conditions.

These artists mobilize art as a means of critique and self-representation at a time when the United States’ diplomatic, cultural, and security frames of seeing Yemen have been heavily focused on state security. This focus often renders Yemen and its people unseen, or rather solely seen through the lenses of the war on terror and national security. The examined artworks mediate a necessary Yemeni diasporic consciousness that promises new narrations and imaginations that are both therapeutic and inspirational.

Author

• Waleed F. Mahdi, University of Oklahoma