Refugee Street Artist Paints Power: Her Murals Break Gender Barriers. 💥🎨
Play & learn about Laila Ajjawi's arty refugee experience 🎮
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Back Story
Laila Ajjawi is an artist and activist born in 1990. She was raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan and now lives in Amman, but still thinks of her hometown as Jenin, a city in the West Bank.
Her parents built the house where she currently lives on the site where her grandparents settled in tents during the Nakba, when an estimated 700,000 Palestinians were forced into exile.
Laila’s art explores the refugee experience through a female lens, illuminating issues such as gender-based violence and the lack of women in the workforce in post-conflict societies, informed by her humanitarian work in the United Nations.
She seeks to challenge stereotypes and assumptions about women refugees through a focus on their collective empowerment, evident in her mural for SheFighter, a women-only martial arts studio in Amman. Her focus on graffiti as a preferred medium is a direct challenge to the notion that street art and other forms of artistic expression should be exclusively male domains.
Laila painted her first mural for Women on Walls, an Egypt-based art festival. The piece was called ‘Look at My Mind’, depicting a woman with her head cracked open and a series of symbolic objects flowing from it. The artist explained in an interview with Azeema that she was “trying to attract both males and females to dig into the mind, rather than just beauty”.
Rejecting the hypersexualisation of women in the media is a focal point of Laila’s work. In an interview with CDDH, Laila explained how the women she depicts are “natural, they are not sexualised and they appear with grey hair and wrinkles”. Through creating portraits of women existing as their authentic selves, she seeks to inspire young girls from similar backgrounds to recognise the importance of self-expression and rejecting societal expectations.
Sources:
https://5g.wilsoncenter.org/video/laila-ajjawis-street-murals-empower-women-and-girls-jordan
https://www.azeemamag.com/stories/lailaajjawi
https://ciutatsdretshumans.cat/en/defensor/laila-ajjawi/
In this post Natasha highlights the arty refugee experience of Laila Ajjawi. She is a citizen journalist on a placement with us organised by Oxford University Career Services. She also organised the micro game to make the journalistic experience interactive.
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