“Tell It to the River: An Artist Talk with Sama Alshaibi”

Sama Alshaibi (b. 1973, Iraq) is an artist working between photography, video, and installation. Her practice explores the notion of aftermath-the fragmentation and dispossession that violates the individual and a community following the destruction of their social, natural, and built environment. In her photographs and videos, Alshaibi often uses her own body as both subject and medium, a staging site for encounters, peripheries, and refuge, even when carrying the markings of war and dislocation. In several of her projects, Alshaibi complicates the coding of the Arab female figure found in the image history of photographs and moving images.

Alshaibi is a Guggenheim Fellow, the 2023 Art Matters' Betty Parsons Fellow, the 2021 recipient of the Phoenix Art Museum's Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award and the 2019 Artpace International Artist-in-Residence. Her work has been exhibited in numerous biennales and museums, including the 55th Venice Biennale, the 2020 State of the Art (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, AK), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), the Phoenix Art Museum and the Barjeel Foundation (U.A.E.), among others. In 2015, Aperture published her monograph Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In, featuring the artist's Silsila series.

Sponsored by the Visiting Artist Series of the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, MFA EDA, and Cinematic Arts