This piece was my contribution to the 2017 edition of Baladk Jordan’s annual graffiti and street art festival. 2017 was the first of four times I have participated in Baladk. Under the theme, “You and I,”

I produced this piece with two primary motivations in mind. First, my canvas for the mural is located in a neighborhood in which many residents are Sudanese refugees—a community that is extremely marginalized within Jordan.

I painted two Sudanese figures as a celebration of this group’s presence in the neighborhood, and in Jordan generally.

Second, I depicted two bodies in a loving embrace while avoiding certain characteristics that might enable or invite an easy gendering of the subjects in order to unsettle common assumptions about the relationship between gender and intimacy which made the people passing by question the gender of the figures, since homosexuality has so far hardly been socially accepted in Jordan.

Thank you!