Thana Faroq: Collecting the Fragments of Statelessness

For Thana Faroq, photography began in Yemen as a necessity, not ambition. “It wasn’t a grand plan,” she recalls. “I had things to say, and the camera became a tool to speak my mind. It felt powerful to finally have that voice.” That urgency – to document, to bear witness, to give form to what might otherwise vanish – remains at the heart of her work.

Now based in The Hague, Faroq has built a multidisciplinary practice that moves between photography, film, sound, and writing. Her projects explore memory, migration, and the aftermath of conflict with quiet depth. Her portraits often linger on the thresholds between visibility and absence, revealing how people carry the weight of both what was lost and what endures.

A defining moment in her career, she says, came with leaving Yemen during the war. “That shift pushed me to start documenting not just my own experience, but the aftermath of conflict—how people live, adapt, and carry on,” she explains. “And that’s what led to my first book, I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows.” The book established her as one of the most resonant visual voices chronicling migration from within rather than from afar, someone whose own story is interwoven with those she captures.

Faroq’s practice is as much about listening as it is about image making. “My work is deeply collaborative,” she says. “I engage with migrant women in the diaspora, and their participation is at the heart of my process, whether through storytelling, photography, or shared authorship. Even when I tell my own story, it’s shaped through dialogue with them.” These exchanges in kitchens, living rooms, and informal gatherings form a living archive of memory and survival. “There’s something about the emotional interior landscape of women in those rooms that keeps me going,” she reflects.

Her creative process begins with a feeling rather than a concept. “It often starts with urgency, something unsettled, something that insists on being made,” she continues. “I imagine how it might translate into the world and, slowly, it does. That moment when an idea becomes real is everything.”

That same intuitive rhythm is shaping her upcoming debut film, Imagine Me Like a Country of Love. The project was born from her return to Yemen after nearly a decade away. “It’s about what happens when we disturb the memories we’ve left behind,” she explains. “The film is fragmented, fluid, and rooted in memory.” Like much of her work, it resists linear narrative, unfolding instead as a meditation on longing and the tenderness of return.

Faroq’s commitment to storytelling extends beyond her own authorship. As a teacher and collaborator, she creates space for others to narrate their own experiences, a form of cultural preservation that is both intimate and collective. “I want to keep pushing the boundaries of mediums to let new forms of storytelling emerge,” she continues. “My practice – layered and alive – is a growing archive for women, refugees, and migrants.”

Ultimately, she hopes this body of work will become a lasting resource. “One day, I want it to be a testament, a place of return,” she says. “A way for future generations to understand who we were, how we endured, and how we imagined beyond survival.” Through her lens, exile becomes an archive.