The Weight of Snow on Her Chest

The Weight of Snow on Her Chest is a portrait of home by the Kashmiri visual artist Zainab, that carries the everyday feelings of suffocation and anxiety in a place where both identity and existence are threatened. The photographs are accompanied by verses that draw upon her role as a photojournalist documenting property destructions and encounters in other Kashmiri homes. The combination of image and text within this work skillfully recasts photographs as metaphors. Her work distills the effects of an enforced and oppressive isolation that the people of Kashmir resist.