Umbai is a speculative photographic series that imagines Arab futurism in the Kuwaiti context. The word “umbai” is a feminized word in Kuwaiti slang, it is a statement of surprise at the absurd and unexpected.
Maneuvering between documentary photography, and constructed self-portraits, this series depicts 5 characters that are situated within their own universes to portray the potentiality of other ways of being.
“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.”
(Muñoz, 2009: 1)