T H E  B I B I  G I R L S

The series ‘The Bibi Girls’ is a set of portraits of two young Afghan girls. As an artist I am driven by personal questions about my own cultural background and have produced these works in an effort to explore the nature of growing up as a young Middle-Eastern, Islamic female in Britain.

I am a half English, half Iranian woman and was born and raised in Britain within western British culture. Being of mixed ethnic origin has led me to grow ever curious about what my life would have been like had I of grown up within Middle-Eastern Islamic customs, a way of life sometimes seen as almost opposite in many ways to that of western culture.

In an effort to gain a better understanding of what could have been, I began working with a family from Afghanistan who although they have lived in the U.K for some years and are becoming familiar to the western ways of Britain, their own culture remains deeply rooted. In order to gain a first hand account of a culture not too dissimilar from that of Iranian customs, the family honourably welcomed me into their home.

The works focus on two girls from the family, Rulia age seven and Basraj age eight.The girls are photographed with an often passive and expressionless face with the aim of steering away from the conventional portraits usually made of children. This has been with the intention of drawing emphasis to the details surrounding the girls such as their style of dress and the environment they are in all in all making reference to the culture of the children with subtle hints throughout the series to note western influence or involvement.

As stated by Iranian artist Shirin Nesaht in the book 'Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art, I made a decision that my work was not going to be about me and my opinion on the subject, but an observation of the girls and how they choose to be photographed with very little direction from myself as the image-maker.