Installation at SurfPoint Residency, York, Maine. November 2026
Materials: Custom-made aluminum sign, 3M Diamond Grade reflective sheeting, galvanized steel posts. Sign Dimensions: 48 Å~ 35 inches. Post height: 8 feet.
All Seas Lead To Gaza is part of a series of custom-made signs, started in 2023, that explores urban sign language as a representative of power, authority, and global public visual language. The signs in this series fail to signal a clear message and often combine Arabic calligraphy with English text at varying levels of legibility to explore associations with Arabic writing and confront the Western gaze with its inability to fully understand.
Installed at SurfPoint in York, Maine, All Seas Lead To Gaza is facing the Atlantic Ocean from one of America’s most beautiful eastern shores, approximately 5,400 miles from Gaza. The text, layered in Arabic and English and fully legible only to viewers who can recognize the marks of both languages, serves as a reminder of the connections between all bodies of water. A gaze toward the horizon can make its way to Gaza, even when Gaza remains unseen. The waves and waters carry the grief of Palestinians across distances and borders.
Centering Gaza, like ancient Rome, imagined as the center toward which all paths led, feels particularly significant when considering the war’s impact on political changes across the globe. Despite Gaza’s physical isolation and blockade, the genocide was not unseen. The oceans, too, are witnesses.
The project is aiming to have multi-location presentations and travel across the Seven Oceans and the Mediterranean, from the East Coast to the West Coast of the USA, to other continents across the seven Oceans.