In her multidisciplinary art, Ashkar engages with issues of identity, social critique, and gender. Using painting, photography, performance, and installation, she creates a fantastic dream-like world, directly connected to changes in the sociopolitical atmosphere, offering an opportunity to generate dialogues on our society and culture. In her years of activity as an artist, Ashkar created a personal language that draws on her Arab cultural origin, tradition, texts, poetry, and eastern and western local politics. She works with the private realm and uses her self portrait as a platform for various visual representations that echo the interrelations between her and her surroundings. The calligraphy that she paints on her face as a daily practice has become a unique and fascinating identifier and a performative act that carries a message and a statement, resonating and impacting her work in a range of mediums... more