In "My Dual World", I reflect on the psychological reality of starting life from scratch in a new country during the war. This experience often demands constant strength in public spaces—smiling, functioning, adapting—while private moments reveal an entirely different emotional truth. I work with natural coffee because it resists control. It stains, spreads, and cracks unpredictably, much like memory and trauma. Through this medium, I explore how identity fractures under extreme change and how healing is neither linear nor immediate. The visible cracks in the portrait are not symbols of weakness; they are records of survival. This painting is about the quiet, daily struggle to reclaim happiness—not as a mask, but as a genuine state of being. It is about the courage to hold pain and hope simultaneously, and the slow, human process of becoming whole again.

Medium: natural coffee on the cotton canvas

Size: 18X24 in