Jaded

One of our punishments in primary school was to copy the same line a hundred to a thousand times, depending on the severity of the act of disobedience: "I will not create unnecessary chatter in class so as to not disturb my classmates' learning." I remember this punishment vividly because I always wondered whether the teacher really thought that if we wrote the line enough times, we would actually internalize its message. 

As I have come to learn, we all give each other this sort of punishment all the time. We don't necessarily write the lines but we tell them to ourselves and each other, until hopefully, someday, they ring true: "I am okay", "everything's fine", "all good". 

These lines are about keeping it together and feeling as we are told - a skill we are forced to learn as children, which is reinforced in school, and rewarded in the workplace. God forbid we descend into emotional chaos and admit that it's not fine, that we are not okay, that things are only rarely good. What's to come of us then? Would it help to admit it? Would anyone help? 


Everything's Fine

Everyone's home today was the first artwork I created during lockdown —with utmost reluctance—, as an ode to freedom: the one the entire world was missing and craving in that moment, and also to the freedom within.

In this piece, freedom is represented through balloons, as a metaphor for the lightness of spirit that remains when fears are faced and lessons are learned. 

Everyone's Home Today

Sitting pretty helped me work through my frustration with a world that buries women so deep within themselves that they forget who they are. I used heavy and dark brush strokes for my grief, while suggesting some solace in the bright landscapes outside of the confines of masculinity. In this painting, a beheaded womanly form “sits pretty” in a toxic room, surrounded by the predatory gaze of men and a god that tells her to stay put and wait out her suffering.

Sitting Pretty

This painting is an exploration of gender norms —which have often felt like a prison to me and whose paradigms I have always rejected as a consequence of my experience with sexual abuse as a child. It portrays the essential conversation between masculinity and femininity. 

The collage reflects on what shapes the male identity, creating an illusion of unstoppable freedom for men yet being so restrictive that it breeds violence. I examine men as prisoners of their manhood and the acts of violence it leads them to perpetrate.

Permission To Be Man

No more kings is my claim for space in a world built by white men to serve their own kind, and which often relied on the suffering of people like me, black women.

In this painting, I reject being seen as a tool for labour, a sacrificial body, an afterthought. I’ve engraved the names of every woman in my family on the piece to immortalise the print each of them has left in the world. 

No More Kings

In Queen of the gram, I reflect on how social media affects our self-worth and our idea of what femininity is. In this artwork we see an anxious-looking woman adorned with a crown, a face full of make-up and a fancy hairdo, who is surrounded by a jaded audience waiting to see what she does next to please them. 

Queen Of The Gram

A dialogue between black aesthetics of the 1960s and the appropriated black aesthetics of today. 

For Consumption Only

An ode to the post-colonial feminism movement in Senegal.

La Femme Noire

A visual rant about the commodification of the black female body and the continuous appropriation of its aesthetic. 

Digitized collage on a physical base acrylic and ink on canvas.



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Linda Dounia Rebeiz

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