In Your Home































"In Your Home" (2008-2011) is a self-portrait series in which I have intuitively and secretly appropriated other people’s private spaces with my own nude body. When I have been left alone in someone’s house, even if for a few fleeting minutes, I have whipped out my compact 35mm camera, and with the use of the self-timer, shot myself in the domestic space, without the host’s knowledge. I have used bedside tables, piles of books, or wardrobes as makeshift tripods, and placed myself in the space through an intuitive and spontaneous choice of composition.

The privacy of my body overlaps with the privacy of the domestic space, and the resulting marriage is exposed through its confrontational display into the public sphere. The layers of appropriation are multiple: I invite you to peer into the privacy of my body while simultaneously taking over the privacy of another’s domestic space. There results, through the displacement of the body, a sometimes fusional, sometimes clashing layering of two subjects – one present and the other absent– in the frame created by the photographic composition.





Exhibition view, The Running Horse gallery, Lebanon, 2011
© All rights reserved. Rasha Kahil, 2021