Sama Alshaibi’s newest body of work from her solo exhibition Staging the Imagined, reflects the relationships of power and authority between photographer and subject. The work investigates how a particular historical period can alter viewers’ interpretations of photographs. Through various projects, Alshaibi reframes historical photographs and moving images that according to Grace Aneiza Ali “reference a grave historic malpractice—the role of photography, both colonial and contemporary, in reducing the body, the life, the desires, the experiences, the hopes and dreams, indeed the very existence, of the Middle Eastern woman to a dangerous single story—one rooted in the primitive and in fear, fantasy, inferiority, and objectification.”.

In her central project, Carry Over, Alshaibi alludes to the ‘Oriental’ portrait photographs of the region’s women made by Western photographers in the late 19th and early 20th century. Produced through historic printing processes of the era, albumen and photogravure, the images depict the female subject carrying sculptural vessels over her head. Ali notes that Alshaibi’s use of the Arab female body and notably her own body in her work, “is intentional in fashioning the headdresses as vessels that are overwhelming, if not overpowering... Alshaibi interrogates objects rampant throughout the genre of Orientalist portrait photography—the veil, mashrabiya, smoker’s pipe—that have aided a Western gaze.”

In her video Catalogue, Alshaibi appropriates newsreel cinema rushes filmed between 1935–1955 by the British Pathé news agency. The reportage on the lives of Middle Eastern women is composited with a video of the artist performing as a live human water feature in the tradition of figurative fountain sculptures installed in public spaces. Alshaibi also conjures up public space, propaganda and self-representation through political posters.  Mass circulated in the mid to late 20th century by cheap printing technology, Generation after Generation and Affiche further complicate the staging of Middle Eastern women by presenting the female farmer and revolutionary fighter as a gender equal in the people’s popular struggle for Palestine’s liberation. 

Sama Alshaibi’s Staging the Imagined is an implicit critique of the social exploitation generated over a century of images of Middle Eastern women, while disrupting the paradigm through a strategy of assigning power through the female body and narration of her stage.

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Selection of quoted text from exhibition catalogue: Women’s Work:  Art & Activism in the 21st Century, curated and authored by Grace Aneiza Ali (Pen + Brush Gallery, NYC, NY, 2019)

Generation after Generation was commissioned by Artpace International Artist Residency.

Carry Over was supported in part by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, Arizona Commission of the Arts, the Project Development 1st Prize Award from The Center at Santa Fe, University of Arizona and Artpace International Artist Residency.