“Moon of +17,400 Tears” was presented as part of Collective Grief: A Path Through Shared Sorrow and Resilience, exhibited at DADAA Gallery in Fremantle, Western Australia.
This work reflects on the profound grief and the impossibility of memorialising the over 17,400 Palestinian children killed in the ongoing war on Gaza. Drawing from the traditional Gazan embroidery motif Qamar el-Damoua’ (قمر الدموع), or “Moon of Tears,” the work reimagines this cross-stitched pattern through the blooming of native red poppies (Anemone coronaria), known in Palestinian folklore as Al-Dahnoon (الدحنون). It is believed these flowers sprout where martyrs have fallen.
To create the video installation, I filmed myself watercolouring 574 individual poppies. Each of these video clips was placed according to the geometry of the original embroidery pattern. The composition loops continuously, with the videos fading in and out as each flower is completed—emerging and disappearing like fleeting lives remembered in ritual.
Accompanying this symbolic blooming is an audio recording of me reciting the names of over 11,000 of those children. Yet the sheer number of lives lost makes it impossible for any visitor to hear every name. This impossibility becomes part of the work—underscoring the immeasurable scale of loss and the unbearable weight of collective grief.
The act of creating this work was also deeply personal. It became part of my own process of mourning. Slowing down and attending to the intricacies of watercolour connected me to my father, a Nakba survivor, whom I lost four years ago. I painted each poppy using his brushes. In holding them, I held onto all the love I wished I had better expressed to him. My grief poured into the paper like the red dye I was using—flooding it gently, just as I wished my tears could flood this world in his absence.
Personal grief is inseparable from collective grief. When asked by the curator Nas Ghadiri to write a statement about the exhibition, this is what I shared:
“I was told to move on. I was expected to move on.
But one thing I have learned through my personal journey with grief is that: there is no ‘moving on.’
Grief is a space we inhabit. A space where personal and collective histories intertwine, each deepening the other.
I grieve my sister, who passed in 2013, and my father, who passed in 2021, every time I grieve for my homeland.My father—the Palestinian blood in me—survived the Nakba only to live his entire life in exile. He died without the chance to return, without being embraced by the land of his ancestors.
Every face I see crying, every person collapsing under the unbearable burden of loss, every soul I witness lost in darkness—reminds me of me.
There is a viscerality to witnessing such pain. This is how the personal collides with the collective: through the sense of knowing.
A realisation that makes the grief of others become your own.Grief becomes another language. A way to speak our truths.
Grief is not a wound that time can mend—it is the emergence of unexpressed love.
A living archive of memory and resistance.Collective grief holds within it threads of connection. It teaches us to hold tenderness beside devastation.
It reminds us that mourning can be an act of resistance and remembrance—an act of defiance against those who seek to render our suffering invisible.At the heart of our collective grief is a continuation of love.
Love that insists on being seen, heard, and honoured.
A love that is unashamedly intertwined with pain.
A love resilient enough to imagine a better world.This exhibition is a testament to that collective grief and its immense expression of love.”