ABOUT
Sinatra Zantout (b. 1996, Lagos) is a Lebanese-Nigerian contemporary artist living and working in the UK. Although she officially began working as a professional artist in 2022, her relationship with art goes back much further, built over years of making, watching closely, trusting instinct, and staying close to storytelling.
Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, she started her career there, then relocated to the UK in 2023 to open up new paths and find wider possibilities in the art world.
Her work sits inside a personal style she calls Masqueradism. In it, she brings together African masks, created with references to different tribes, and portrait paintings of women of colour. That meeting point is where her ideas live: strength, identity, and the quieter truths her subjects hold. Each piece works like both an offering and a challenge, giving space to stories that often get passed over.
In 2025, her practice reached a new stage. She was chosen as one of nine finalists for the Dubel Prize, and through the prize she presented her first solo exhibition. It was a clear marker of how her work is landing with people, and it placed her among the emerging voices in contemporary art.
Artist Statement
My practice addresses identity, spirituality, memory, and the understated endurance of women whose lives and stories are frequently left out of view. Working from a Lebanese-Nigerian background, I am guided by the layered nature of culture and by an awareness of the emotional pull of faith, displacement, inheritance, and belonging. Through portraiture, I consider both the seen and unseen ways people hold strength, with particular attention to women of colour.
A central strand of my work is Masqueradism, a term I introduced to reconsider how the African mask can function within contemporary portraiture. Here, the mask is not a device for hiding. Instead, it serves as a means of disclosure, pointing to ancestral presence, cultural memory, protection, and the emotional coverings people take on to endure, to fit, and to survive. By placing tribal-inspired masks within portraits of women, I disrupt familiar readings of the face and open room for narratives that run deeper.
The paintings move between private reflection and shared experience. They are informed by memory and observation, as well as by emotional truths that are often left unsaid. Through this work, I seek to recognise the steady strength of my subjects and invite viewers to think about the inner lives, histories, and forms of protection that all of us carry.
"NO EYE CAN SEE ME" Series Statement
No Eye Can See Me is a painting series focused on visibility, safety, and the inner lives of women whose strength is more often steady than loud. Throughout the works, masked figures move through scenes of work, caregiving, migration, commerce, faith, and self-presentation. The settings range from market traders in Lagos and Peckham to mothers uprooted by conflict, keeping attention on women who hold communities together while still being missed, misread, or left outside the frame.
Here, the mask is not treated as a way to hide. It is presented as a way to show what is usually kept private, carrying ancestry, cultural belonging, and a kind of emotional shielding. It speaks to the unseen layers people put on to keep going, to look after others, and to get through what they face. The title, No Eye Can See Me, sits inside that push and pull, wanting recognition, yet choosing to keep part of the self out of reach in a world that often looks but does not truly notice.
As a whole, the series reflects on the imprint of colonial pasts, displacement, class, beauty standards, and consumer culture on daily life. Most of all, it stands as a gesture of respect, bringing forward the dignity, endurance, and quiet authority of women of colour, and placing their burdens, realities, and inner resolve in clear view.