Sama Alshaibi

Sama Alshaibi’s photographs and videos situate her own body as a site of performance in consideration of the social and gendered impacts of war and migration. Her work complicates the coding of the Arab female figure found in the image history of photographs and moving images. Alshaibi’s sculptural installations evoke the disappearance of the body and act as counter-memorials to war and displacement. Alshaibi’s monograph, Sand Rushes In, was published by Aperture, NYC. It features her 8-year Silsila series (debuted at the 55th Venice Biennale), which probes the human dimensions of borders and environmental demise. Alshaibi has exhibited in 20 solo exhibitions and over 150 group exhibitions, including State of The Art 2020 (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art), Cairo International Biennale (Egypt, 2019), Ayyam Gallery (Dubai, 2019), Pen + Brush (NYC, 2019), Marta Herford Museum (Germany, 2017) and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (NY, 2017). Alshaibi received the 2019 Artpace International Artist Residency and the 2017 Visual Arts Grant from the Arab Fund for Art and Culture (Beirut). Born in Basra, Iraq in 1973 to a Palestinian mother and Iraqi father, she now lives in Tucson where she is Professor of Photography and Video at the University of Arizona.

Photo Credit: Zakiriya Gladney