Thana Faroq’s “How Shall We Greet the Sun” exhibition for Photoville 2025

Sat, Jun 7 - Sun, Jun 22  2025

1 Water St, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Photoville presents "How Shall We Greet the Sun" by Yemeni-Dutch photographer Thana Faroq. The exhibition is on view at Brooklyn Bridge Park’s - Emily Warren Roebling Plaza.

How Shall We Greet the Sun explores the personal stories and emotional landscapes of young women refugees living in the Netherlands, including Thana herself. Published as a book, this project reflects their shared and individual journeys, balancing the challenges of forming new identities within the diaspora with the nostalgia and trauma of their pasts. These women navigate lives shaped by new cultural contexts, power dynamics, and memories, exploring how identities are continuously reshaped by current circumstances and the homes they left behind.

Within this larger project, a short video offers an intimate lens into the fragmented memories of women migrants, mediating between the joy of reclaiming normalcy and the sorrow of loss. It juxtaposes Randa’s reflection on the simple yet profound joy of having a private bathroom in a refugee camp with Thana’s mother in Yemen, who shares a family photo filled with faces of those who have passed away in her absence. These intertwined recollections reveal the paradox of creating new memories in post-disaster settings while being haunted by the weight of what was left behind. The film reflects on how memory shapes a sense of belonging and how emotional exile emerges from the tension between joy and grief.

“We are in a kind of archaeological restoration program, where we try to build and construct a new life over the ruins of our past losses. Our homes are under construction. Our bodies are under construction. Our finances are under construction. Our identity is under construction.”

Through her multidisciplinary work combining photography, textual narratives, and moving images, Thana Faroq encapsulates the resilience of women migrants. Her visual and textual explorations serve as a poignant reminder of the continuous process of rebuilding life and identity amidst profound changes and loss.

About Thana Faroq

Thana Faroq is a Yemeni-Dutch photographer, writer, and educator living in the Netherlands. Her multidisciplinary work, which combines photography, textual narratives, and moving images, explores the transformative experiences that have shaped her identity and sense of belonging in both Yemen and the Netherlands. Focused on themes of memory, migration, and intergenerational trauma, her work serves as a visual autobiography, highlighting women’s resilience and the search for belonging in post-disaster contexts. Thana has received several prestigious honors, including the Open Society Foundation Fellowship Grant and the Arab Documentary Fund. She was recognized as ‘One to Watch’ by the British Journal of Photography in 2020 and won the PhotoWien Photo Book Award in 2021 for her book “I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows.” Currently, she is a fellow in the first iteration of the ADPP fellowship program.

About Photoville

Founded in 2011 in Brooklyn, NY, Photoville was built on the principles of addressing cultural equity and inclusion, which we are always striving for, by ensuring that the artists we exhibit are diverse in gender, class, and race. In pursuit of its mission, Photoville produces an annual, city-wide open air photography festival in New York City, a wide range of free educational community initiatives, and a nationwide program of public art exhibitions. By activating public spaces, amplifying visual storytellers, and creating unique and highly innovative exhibition and programming environments, we join the cause of nurturing a new lens of representation. Through creative partnerships with festivals, city agencies, and other nonprofit organizations, Photoville offers visual storytellers, educators, and students financial support, mentorship, and promotional & production resources, on a range of exhibition opportunities.

This exhibition is supported by DutchCultureUSA’s FUTURE 400 program.