Excavating the Image: Photographic Interventions  

With Mivan Makia

Ages 17+

In English and Arabic

What can be revealed when you disrupt an image? Borrowing tactics from Jorge Tacla—who paints ‘in negative’ to bring new truths to the surface—test out a variety of interventions with analogue film images. Scratch, puncture, paint or erase parts of the negative. Reverse tones or colours, flip the frame or crop the photos. Finally, after scanning both the original and transformed images, put them together as diptychs to examine how alteration can create new meaning. 

Designed for photographers, artists and creatives at all levels, this session is free and materials are provided.

Before you take part in the workshop, join us for a tour of the exhibition Jorge Tacla: Time the destroyer is time the preserver in Galleries 1, 2 and 3, Al Mureijah Square. Observe how Tacla’s paintings place a renewed urgency on human faculty and memory in navigating the complexities of representation and interpretation. 

Sharjah Art Foundation is committed to making its programmes inclusive and accessible. You can arrange for any support needed through the registration form.

For more information, email learning@sharjahart.org or call (06) 544 4113.

About the artist:

Mivan Makia is a filmmaker, visual artist, and researcher.  

Interested in self-portraiture and West Asian cultural expression, her practice moves fluidly between disciplines—drawing from anthropology, archival research, and experimental image-making—to delve into the fluctuating perspectives of transient bodies. Often working with collected earth matter and archives, she treats these materials not as fixed records but as living sources open to remediation, reconstruction, intervention, and participation. Her work explores the relationship between these bodies and the landscape through memory work, geopolitical narratives, and speculative fiction.  

Makia has exhibited her films in festivals and screenings internationally including Canada, USA, England, Spain, France and the UAE.