In this painting, Salma Abouhasswa, Saad Khakwani, Aimen Khan, and Davinder Singh visually portray a scene from a reimagined version of The Tempest. The group draws on the work of with Rodó, Retamar, and Césaire—three interpretations of The Tempest that re- center the marginal and marginalized characters in Shakespeare’s play—in order to show, as Abouhasswa put it, “the power dynamics between characters that have little to no power over the people above them.” The painting focuses on Alonso, Gonzalo, Caliban, Ferdinand, and Miranda, giving each of these characters a new constellation of motives and providing an opportunity to interrogate the nature of the power dynamics in The Tempest and what forces uphold them—whether it’s the individual personalities or an ingrained social system of arbitrary hierarchies. The painting itself, as Khakwani points out, uses perspective, distance, relative size, and eye contact to indicate the power dynamics outlined in the artists’ reflections.

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