The Vulnerability of Power: Political Art and Visual Narratives of Migration in the Work of Abdalla Al Omari

Abstract

This article analyzes the work of artist Abdalla Omari, focusing on The Vulnerable series, as an aesthetic intervention in the visual regimes that shape contemporary narratives of migration. Starting from the question of how vulnerability can operate as a political language in visual art, it argues that Omari subverts hegemonic iconographies of power by portraying world leaders as refugees, enacting an iconographic inversion that displaces the symbolic privilege of invulnerability and reinscribes vulnerability as a transnational critical category. Methodologically, the article combines a case study with qualitative, interpretive visual analysis, integrating formal description, critical reading, and historical-political contextualization. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay, Jacques Rancière, Walter Benjamin, and Judith Butler, it further examines how the digital circulation of these images enhances their critical potential by functioning as a counter-archive and producing dissensus beyond the institutional art circuit. Finally, exile is discussed not merely as a biographical condition but as an aesthetic and epistemological method that articulates memory, denunciation, and collective imagination amid contemporary migratory and humanitarian crises.