Biography
Othman Shehadeh is a Palestinian visual artist based in Amman. Using generative AI as his primary medium, he creates fashion images where the body becomes a site of surrealist transformation — figures crowned with living organisms, draped in materials that have no name, caught inside environments built from their own internal logic. His work draws on the tension between the sculptural and the synthetic, the ceremonial and the alien. Shaped by a life lived across borders that don’t quite reconcile, his practice treats identity not as something worn but as something perpetually under construction.
Statement
I grew up between places that don’t quite claim each other — Palestinian by origin, born in Saudi Arabia, living in Jordan. Identity, for me, has always been something performed under negotiation rather than simply worn. That instability is why I’m drawn to the body as a site of transformation rather than expression — a surface to be built upon, obscured, and reimagined.
Fashion is the most loaded surface I could put on a body — it already carries culture, status, identity, belonging. When I replace it with something that shouldn’t exist, all of that meaning comes with it. A garment poured from liquid metal still reads as a garment. A headpiece that is also a living organism still reads as adornment. That gap between what something is and what it’s pretending to be is exactly where I want to work.
The tension I keep returning to is between the sculptural and the synthetic, the inflatable beside the ancient. These combinations don’t resolve. They’re not supposed to. They hold the same irreconcilable quality as the places I move between, where things exist side by side without ever quite becoming a single coherent picture.