Self Portrait as Other presents the text of the German constitution in Arabic, rendered through the visual language of Islamic manuscript tradition and Qur’anic illumination.

By placing the constitutional text within a form culturally coded as Arabic and Islamic, the work exposes how legibility is conditioned by power, prejudice, and historically produced habits of perception. What is commonly understood as secular, universal, and democratic can quickly appear unfamiliar, suspect, or even threatening when articulated through a script and aesthetic tradition that has been racialised and othered within contemporary Europe.

The work asks what happens when the symbolic core of modern German identity appears in a form many have been trained not to recognise as their own. Rather than representing Islamophobia or Arabophobia directly, it allows these structures to emerge through the act of looking itself. The text does not change, only its visual body does. In that shift, the work reveal belonging, authority, and legitimacy are never read innocently, but are shaped by the cultural politics of recognition.