SABRINE S.
HAKAM
How do histories of power shape what we see, what we wear and how we resist? READ THE ROOM explores the politics hiding in plain sight, from portraiture and popular culture to fashion and everyday symbols.
power in portraits
2023
Photograph
‘Orientalism’ describes how the ‘Orient’ was constructed through a Eurocentric gaze, othering and subjugating its histories, cultures, and identities. The ‘Oriental woman’ is portrayed as exotic, inscrutable, and mysterious, while the interplay of veiling and unveiling simultaneously invokes her resistance to and submission under the gaze.
2023
Photograph
Morningstar Quill
This portrait brings together two women, wrapped in the cloths of their respective cultures, whose lives are shaped by distinct colonial histories and experiences of living in Canada as a First Nations woman and a newcomer. They find common ground in their shared love of culture and the enduring work of cultural continuity, identity, and belonging.
2023
Photograph
This is the subaltern: the forgotten, the ignored, the subjugated. The voices pushed to the margins, denied the power to speak, represent, and define themselves. Yet its voice, its call, grows like a flower—evoking the hope and power that lie in reclaiming our narratives.
2023
Photograph
To gaze is not simply to look; it is to hold the power over what—and whom—we observe. Drawing on the visual language of wildlife photography, this portrait places the viewer in the position of observer, only to have that position unsettled by distinctly human eyes staring back. The gaze is reversed, collapsing the boundary between observer and observed and forcing us to question who has the power to look, who gets to represent, and who gets to be seen.
2023
Photograph
The portrait disrupts this imagined spectrum of tradition to modernity through textiles. On one side, the subject wears Johara, a North African handmade textile rooted in cultural tradition; on the other, denim—an emblem of mass consumption and Americana. Yet both exist on the same body. Tradition and modernity are not opposing ends of a linear journey, but coexisting ways of being. What appears to be a universal path to ‘modernity’ is, in fact, a Western vision of progress imposed as the norm
2024 ∞
Pop Art/Culture Jamming
Decolonize everything. Using a tongue-in-cheek approach blending pop art and culture jamming, the goal of this project is to turn a complex academic conversation into something immediate, accessible, and impossible to ignore. Because decolonization isn’t just a theory—it’s a question of what we choose to challenge, dismantle, and reimagine.
Decolonize what?
Everything.
The Revolutionary Fit turns the language of fashion into a language of protest. Bringing together garments, symbols and visual references from anti-colonial and liberation movements, the work imagines a wardrobe built from histories of resistance.
Getting dressed becomes an act of remembering, reclaiming and reappropriating.
Sabrine S. Hakam
Researcher/Artist
Sabrine S. Hakam is a researcher, visual artist, and writer working across urban studies, visual culture, public history, and the politics of representation. Her research examines how cities are experienced, represented, and contested, with a particular interest in socio-spatial infrastructures and the relationship between everyday experience and broader political and cultural processes.
Since 2021, Hakam has developed an interdisciplinary visual practice alongside her academic research, working across photography, exhibition-making, public history, and community arts. Her work includes Power in Portraits, an ongoing project exploring the relationship between photography, identity, memory, and representation, and Decolonize Everything!, a tongue-in-cheek visual project that uses culture jamming and pop art to challenge colonial legacies and make the complex processes of decolonization accessible to a wider public.
Sabrine has also worked in community-based and public-history contexts, including curating The Pavilion, a community-based exhibition at Market Lane Public School in Toronto, and animating Mackenzie House, one of ten Toronto History Museums, as part of the Toronto History Museums mentorship programme. Her photographic work has been exhibited at Kitchener City Hall’s Rotunda Gallery, the Museum of Dufferin, Artspace Regent Park, SPAO: Photographic Arts Centre, and Bayside Gallery in Toronto.
King’s College London, PhD. Geography
2020
London School of Economics, MSc. Urbanisation and Development
2014
University of Oxford, MPhil. Development Studies
2012
New York University, BSc. Media, Culture and Communication
2010
Solo Shows
Power in Portraits - Kitchener City Hall Rotunda Gallery - Kitchener, Ontario
2025
Embodying Health x Weber and Shandwick PR - Toronto HQ
2025
We Are Our Words - Toronto History Museums (Mackenzie House), Toronto, Ontario
2024
Decolonize Everything! - Bayside Gallery Exhibition - Toronto, Ontario
2024
Postcolonialism 101 - Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival Toronto, Ontario
2022
The Birth of Modernisation - Unity in Diversity - Museum of Dufferin, Ontario
2024
The Birth of Modernisation - SPAO Photowalk Exhibition - Ottawa, Ontario
2024
The Pavilion - Market Lane Public School, Toronto, Ontario
2024
Power in Portraits - Fashion Art Toronto
2023
Calyx - 264 The Esplanade, Jamii, Toronto, Ontario
2023
Awards/Mentorships
2025 - Public History Award Nominee, Heritage Toronto
2024 - Best in Show, Unity in Diversity, Museum of Dufferin
2024 - The Reset Mentorship, Toronto History Museums
2023/24 - Newcomer Artist Mentorship, Toronto Arts Council