‘طرس’ (Tterss–Palimpsest)
Solo exhibition, Ayyam Gallery, 15 April - 30 May 2025, Dubai, UAE
طرس is Sama Alshaibi’s most solo exhibition featuring her most recent body of work. The exhibition brings together mixed-media collages and video art that reimagine Baghdad’s transformation—its peaks, declines, and latent possibilities. Through Alshaibi’s work, Baghdad becomes a site of physical presence and alternative visions—one that is “always mediated, annotated, and glimpsed through shifting thresholds.” — Sama Alshaibi
Duplicates, Sama Alshaibi, mixed media collage
'Maknana: An Archeology of Media Art in the Arab World'
Diriyah Art Futures | Riyahd | Saudi Arabia
25 of April - 19 of July, 2025
For its second major show, Diriyah Art Futures brings together 40+ artists from across the Middle East, spotlighting their use of technology and new media to shape art in the contemporary Arab world. The exhibition will run until July 19 at DAF in Diriyah.
The exhibition explores the rich history of new media arts in the Arab world through a collection of over 70 works of art by more than 40 pioneering Arab artists. The Arabic term “Maknana,” meaning the act of entrusting a task to a machine or becoming part of it, inspires the exhibition’s central inquiry: how Arab artists have interacted with, repurposed, and challenged technology to shape their creative vocabularies. The selected works engage with contemporary sociopolitical contexts, from digital protest and machine logic to memory preservation, speculative environments, and glitch aesthetics.
Prelude to the Round City (2023) by Sama Alshaibi installed at Diriyah Art Futures.
Co-curated by Haytham Nawar and Ala Younis.