Mohamad Abdouni

Doris & Andrea, 2019

The series chronicles the lives of Doris and her genderqueer son/daughter, Andrea. Together, they become an example that challenges the social norms of a heteronormative family unit, ultimately making us wonder what constitutes a family. The images document and offer an alternative to living under a patriarchal society and conforming to the alleged family values of a ‘Middle Eastern family’.

Images include candid, everyday moments of their family life together, but they also showcase archives from their family albums and dramatised studio portraits. The cinematic and snapshot quality of the images provides viewers with an understanding of how their loving relationship manifests in its simplest forms, such as hanging out together on their sofa. The images are a testament to the importance of documenting queer life in all its facets to avoid its singular and often misinterpreted categorisation.

Queerness is an ideal that rejects the here and now as it insists on the potential for another world. The Doris & Andrea series becomes a loving reality of a familial bond that, for many queer folks today, continues to be a fiction.

Mohamad Abdouni (b. 1989 in Beirut, Lebanon) lives and works between Beirut and Istanbul.