Artist in Spotlight 'To paint to tell our stories is resistance'

Malak Mattar in conversation with Pragna Patel and Rashmi Varma

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31273/fd.n8.2025.1988

Abstract

Feminist Dissent is proud and honoured to be able to showcase the art of Malak Mattar in issue 8. This interview features Malak Mattar in conversation with Pragna Patel and Rashmi Varma.

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Author Biographies

  • Malak Mattar

    Malak Mattar was born in 1999 in the Gaza Strip and grew up under occupation and the military siege. From a family of talented cultural practitioners, Mattar started making art as a teenager during a period of open conflict (Operation Protective Edge, 2014), and she soon began to sell work online and exhibit internationally. She won a scholarship to study political science at Istanbul Aydin university (2018–22) and another to study a Masters of Fine Art at Central Saint Martin’s, London, in 2023.

  • Pragna Patel, Project Resist

    Pragna Patel is the co-founder and co-director of Project Resist, an organisation focused on work with marginalised and vulnerable women and girls throughout the UK. She is the former director and founding member of the Southall Black Sisters (SBS) advocacy and campaigning centre where she worked from 1982 to Jan 2022 with a break in 1993 when she left to train and practice as a solicitor.  Over those 40 years, she led SBS in some of its most important cases and campaigns on gender-based abuse, immigration and religious fundamentalism. She is a member of the Editorial Collective of the journal Feminist Dissent which she helped to found, and she was also a founding member of Women Against Fundamentalism.  She has written extensively on race, gender and religion, and she continues with her work in these areas at Project Resist.

  • Rashmi Varma, English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick

    Rashmi Varma teaches English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick in the UK. She is the author of The Postcolonial City and its Subjects (2011) and of the forthcoming Modern Tribal: Representing Indigeneity in Postcolonial India. She has published numerous essays on feminist theory, activism and literature. She lives in London and has been a member of Awaaz-South Asia Watch and Women Against Fundamentalism.

Image 9: My Skin is Not a Sin (2020) by Malak Mattar

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Published

2025-07-14

Issue

No. 8 (2025): Human Rights in an Age of Populist Authoritarianism

Section

Voices of Dissent

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Malak Mattar, Pragna Patel, Rashmi Varma

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