I am an artist and filmmaker based in New York City. Working across video and performance, I examine how visibility becomes entangled with the politics of refusal, particularly under the voyeuristic demands of the global image economy.

In one work, an Israeli surveillance camera in the occupied West Bank seemingly misidentifies a young Palestinian girl's accidentally dropped spoon as a thrown stone, turning an everyday object into an image of political struggle. Other work is more explicitly autobiographical. This includes one that focuses on the haunting sound and diesel fumes of generators sustaining my family's neighborhood in Damascus after the fall of the Assad regime, and another in which I follow my aunt's attempt to turn footage of her mother's destroyed home in Gaza into a short-form vertical video overlaid with an 80s pop song about domestic routines. Often present across the work are creaturely or spectral figures, neither alive nor dead. This appears in a video, which features an unidentifiable, ghostly figure slinking into a screening of a Marx Brothers film for British soldiers in 1940s wartime Cairo, as well as another in which a cadaverous figure, swathed in bandages, traverses a foggy, desolate landscape, rehearsing "non-threatening," innocent-looking walks.

I am a Critic at the Yale School of Art, where I teach courses on critical theory, film and video art, and performance studies.

I can be reached at ayham@ayhamghraowi.com and @ayhamghraowi.