Cry Me a Waterfall (Close My Eyes I Dream of You in Slow-mo), 2021

Artist Jala Wahid’s print edition is drawn from a still of her film Cry Me a Waterfall, an extended music video featuring a performance by Amal Saeed Kurda of a newly composed English-language love song addressed to Bekhal Waterfall in Kurdistan.

In the film, the waterfall becomes both beloved and contested terrain: a site onto which longing, devotion and nationalism are projected. The love song format complicates this desire: is the land to be possessed, protected, conquered or communed with? Wahid exposes the tension between intimacy and sovereignty, revealing how nationalist attachment can blur into fantasy.

Water operates as a central metaphor. Fluid and uncontainable, it resists fixed borders, echoing the condition of Kurdish statelessness. In this context, homeland becomes something unstable, not only a geography denied political recognition, but a shifting emotional and imaginative space.

By isolating a cinematic moment and translating it into print, Jala Wahid condenses the work’s emotional register. The image holds longing and ambiguity in suspension, capturing the friction between personal desire and collective history.

In risograph printing, each colour is printed as a separate pass through a risograph machine — a stencil-based duplicator that presses organic soy inks into the paper. Risograph inks are naturally vibrant — they are renowned for their vivid colours and evident textures. The inks are transparent so layers build to create more colours. Slight shifts in registration and a soft grain make every impression subtly unique.

Cry Me a Waterfall (Close My Eyes I Dream of You in Slow-mo) is printed on Olin natural white 170gsm, an uncoated, FSC-certified stock whose gentle warmth lets the colours glow. The edition is strictly limited to 100 and will never be reprinted. All prints were produced at the London Centre for Book Arts.