The Desire to Not Exist is a photographic triptych that reflects on the absence of images of girlhood in Jeddah within early internet visual culture, particularly during the Tumblr era. The work emerges from a specific social and political context in which women’s visibility and mobility in public space were restricted, shaping how images could be produced, circulated, and encountered.

Where global digital platforms were increasingly structuring identity through visual presence, this absence produced a particular condition: a self formed in relation to images that were elsewhere, inaccessible, or entirely missing.

Drawing from Tawfiq Al-Hakim’s meditation on the desire to not exist, the work considers how this absence generates a form of longing shaped as much by what cannot be seen as by what is visible. The images function less as representations than as traces, standing in for a broader absence within the visual economy of the time. Within this context, the desire to disappear emerges from the experience of never fully appearing in the first place.

As an early work, The Desire to Not Exist marks an entry point into the artist’s ongoing engagement with digital memory, visibility, and the politics of representation.

Mural view:

Iinstallation view:

Mural printing view:

Bates Museum of Art Collection video essay: