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Hiba Jameel
About
Work
CV
Contact
Hiba Jameel
About
Work
CV
Contact
About
Work
CV
Contact

Hiba Jameel (b. Baghdad, Iraq; lives and works in Seattle) is a painter whose work begins where the screen ends.

She came to the United States in 1998, having fled Baghdad with her family four years earlier, moving through countries, crossing borders, learning what it means to exist in the margins of official record. That experience of presence unacknowledged, of identity under threat became the invisible architecture of everything she makes.

Jameel’s process is exacting and physical. She records everyday digital activity on screen, replays it at half speed, traces the movements onto paper, and carries those traced gestures into large-scale paintings. The trace paper is evidence. The painting is testimony. What looks like abstraction is in fact documentation a meticulous archive of the human hand insisting on its own existence.

She is also a mother. She watches her daughter navigate a world being quietly reshaped by forces that do not value human presence. She paints against that. Every canvas is a refusal. Jameel’s work asks a question that will define the coming decades: when machines can generate everything, what does it mean that a human body made this mark, at this moment, by hand?