FILM (4:00 MIN)
2026
How Shall We Greet the Sun explores the representation of women migrants through the conflicting emotions that accompany displacement, memory and survival.
The work is anchored by two intimate moments. In one, the artists’ friend Randa sends her a joyful voice message from a refugee camp, celebrating that she finally has a private bathroom again. What appears ordinary becomes, within displacement, an expression of dignity, privacy and resistance. In another, her mother in Yemen sends her a family photograph and asks her to identify relatives. Looking at the image, she realises that some of them had died during her years in exile.
The video moves between these registers of joy and grief, asking how life continues within displacement and how women’s experiences resist being reduced to narratives of victimhood. Small gestures, memories and moments of pleasure become evidence of persistence: ways of continuing to live, remember and claim space.
Thana Faroq is a Yemeni-Dutch artist working across photography, moving image, text and archives. Based in the Netherlands, her practice explores migration, memory, belonging, grief and the ways personal histories intersect with larger political narratives.
Her work often begins from lived experience, family archives and questions of displacement, but resists reducing these subjects to fixed identities or singular stories. Writing, testimony, sound and archival material frequently enter her visual practice as ways of complicating the image and creating space for ambiguity, intimacy and memory.
Thana is the author of the photobooks I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows and How Shall We Greet the Sun. Her recent short film Imagine Me Like a Country of Love extends these concerns into moving image, weaving personal and vernacular archives, text, sound and landscape into a non-linear meditation on home, memory and belonging.