Lina Hashim: “Unlawful Meetings” – Photographing Young Muslim Couples Sexual Encounter

Lina Hashim is a Kuwaiti Postwar & Contemporary artist who was born in 1978. Numerous key galleries and museums such as Kunsthal Aarhus have featured Lina Hashim 's work in the past.The maker's first piece to be offered at auction was "Two photographs from the series “No Wind - 2 Years With Hijab”" at Bruun Rasmussen Bredgade in 2019.

Denmark – 

Like any of the major religions, Islam seeks to regulate sexual relationships between members of their society through moral codes. As laid down in the Quran, any form of sexual behavior – intercourse, oral sex or any action that encourages sexual activity – is strictly forbidden before or outside of marriage. Of course, that doesn’t prevent muslims engaging in ‘unlawful meetings’, in pursuit of romantic love or the sheer gratification of mutual desires.

!Lina Hashim, an Iraqi photographer born in Kuwait and raised in Denmark, investigates the secret encounters that take place between young muslim lovers in parks, hidden between trees, or under the cover of the night on beaches and in parking lots. Using night vision cameras, inconspicuous smartphones or digital cameras equipped with long range telephoto lenses, she captured couples enjoying moments of the greatest intimacy in very public spaces in Sweden and Denmark.


lina hashim box 2


!As Hashim, who also studied anthropology, points out, ‘those who come from a muslim background follow strict rules that subsume their individuality, so that the true self is rarely revealed. The public persona and the private life are two distinct zones, creating paradoxes in everyday life that lead to a form of cultural schizophrenia.’

!This tension between the public and the private spheres, which runs more acutely through the lives of these young muslims than of their non-muslim peers, is reflected in “Unlawful Meetings”. It lies in the invisibility these lovers enjoy in public; for the most part, passersby turn a discretely blind eye to the privacy they create for themselves in shadows and parked cars at nights.

!In her long term project, prompted by the single word ‘CAR’ written on the classroom blackboard by Nicolai Howalt, one of her teachers, she adopts the professional distance of the anthropologist conducting a field study, yet at the same time there is an inescapable sense of surveillance and a voyeurism akin to the work of Kohei Yoshiyuki. In the photographic act again we find the two zones of distance and proximity intertwined in a way that many viewers will find disturbing in its ambiguity.

lina hashim box 4

!Hashim ensures the anonymity of her subjects, and thus the lawfulness of her recordings of their acts, by leaving out colors and by never showing more than 25% of their facial features. Yet what cannot be hidden is the passion, which, according to one of the youths she interviewed, is heightened exactly for being so secretly and so rarely enjoyed.

!For Lina Hashim herself, who identifies as a believing, but not a practicing Muslim, the project has led her to revisit the tenets of her faith as laid down in texts written in times so fundamentally different from today. Convinced that the ban on sex before marriage was written to protect women and their offspring, she wants to put up for discussion the question if contemporary women and men can’t find other options – in terms of health, or legal and financial security for themselves and their children – to take care of themselves.


Written by Hester Keijser – Stead Bureau

Based in The Hague, Hester Keijser is a freelance curator and author specialized in contemporary Photography with a focus on the Middle East.

Related Posts

Blasting Into Space With The Afronauts – Cristina De Middel

© Cristina De Middel, from the series The Afronauts, all rights reserved England – It is not an easy task to interview Cristina ...

Video: Emaho Mussoorie Workshop with Cristina de Middel & Ricardo Cases in collaboration with IED Madrid

Organized by EMAHO and IED MADRID Dated: June 19-22nd June,2014 India The recent success of the Spanish photobook has produced much curiosity and ...

Francois Hebel : The Arles Aesthetic

France –  Francois Hebel, one of the most influential man in photography today boasts of a prolific career, spanning 12 ...

Erik van der Weijde: Home is where the Dog is

Holland –   Photography feature – Erik van der Weijde has produced more then 40 publications. Home is where the Dog is, his latest one, continues his ...

Yaakov Israel: “The Quest for the Man on The White Donkey” – Powerful Photos of Israel/Palestine

Israel – As per the Orthodox Jewish tradition, the Messiah (the Prophet) will arrive riding on a white donkey. A ...

Asako Narahashi: Ever After

Japan –   In Narahashi’s previous photobook, ‘Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water’, (published in 2007 by Nazraeli ...

My Recollections – Mitsu Maeda

Japan – This is a ongoing series of my personal photographs of my grandmother, Tsuyajyo,  who started to have symptoms of ...

Istanbul Urbanization – Raphael Fournier

Turkey – Istanbul, economic and cultural capital of Turkey, second fastest growing country after China, an estimated 17 million inhabitants ...

Biophilia – Marco Vernaschi

THIS STORY CONTAINS EXPLICIT CONTENT Argentina –  The term “Biophilia” literally means “love for life or living systems.” It was first ...