This unpublished book includes photographic portraits of the artist’s friends; the subjects, some of whom have escaped repressive regimes in the East and some who are native to the West, seem to be hypnotised by their phone screens. Through this series of images, the artist explores the idea of a (one sided) conversation between political figures and their anonymous subjects through the medium of the smartphone, between those that dictate and proclaim and those who are dictated to. The figures in her portraits seem restless and secluded in a way that is at odds with the always-on connectivity offered by the technology in their hands. 

Recent tweets from the current and former presidents of USA and Iran and those of five news outlets are layered into 280-character collages; their promises, their grandiose statements and their veiled messages are reduced to a purely aesthetic, graphic form. These collages are placed as a counterpoint to the ethereal portraits challenging the idea that as consumers of media, we can ever receive the world in its entirety.  As the tweet collages compress time into a single image so too do the portraits carry a distinct period of time in which the subject can be seen scrolling on their device.

Through the commonalities that the artist observes between the sloganism experienced in both the East and the West she questions the reductive ‘othering’ carried within the very idea of a separation between these two worlds.