A celebrated investigative journalist, writer and painter, Hayoun draws upon his Tunisian, Moroccan and Egyptian heritage to explore notions of belonging, identity and systems of power.
The death of Hayoun’s grandparents led the artist to interrogate his Jewish Arab roots, culminating in the critically acclaimed memoir When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History, published in 2019 by The New Press, New York – an intimate tribute to his family and an attempt to articulate and explore the Jewish Arab identity. For Hayoun, “Politics are personal - and the more people benefit from certain oppressive power structures, the less likely they are to notice…the degree to which all politics are personal.” In a similar sense, his two poetic novels, Building 46 and Last Night in Brighton, both published by Darf Publishers, London, use the framework of the ghost story to examine sexuality, body image and the North African diaspora.
Personal loss, the pandemic and the example of his grandmother taking up drawing late in life, inspired Hayoun to turn towards painting, a language he has always enjoyed as an immediate, visceral way in which to tell stories. As such, his portraits celebrate the full gamut of society: sex workers, convicts and migrant labourers jostle with political and cultural revolutionaries, as well as personalities from the artist’s childhood, including his beloved grandparents.
His work has been acquired by the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, Geneva and Her Highness Princess Nauf Bendar Al Saud.