Tell it to the River at Maraya

Tell it to the River

Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, UAE
27 Feb 2023 – 30 June 2023

Tell it to the River, a mid-career survey of Iraqi-Palestinian artist Sama Alshaibi, maps a journey of a twenty-year practice. The works portray experiences of displacement revolving around the social circumstances of an individual exiled from a city, a country, and a citizenship due to war and migration.

This exhibition debuts two commissions; Prelude to the Round City, inaugurating the first chapter of Sama Alshaibi's 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, and Iihyaa' (‘Revival’), the closing chapter of Alshaibi's project Silsila (‘Link’) from 2009 - 2017.

Bridging an encounter of Alshaibi's past and present works, Tell it to the River speaks of a displaced body time-traveling in multiple states of consciousness in an ever-evolving process of shedding, repeating, returning, and reliving. Living in the memory of the past, alien in the present, and repeatedly constructing a home and an identity.

Prelude to the Round City is an immersive, circular installation generated by LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scans, a technology originally developed for military targeting. The installation encapsulates Iraq's post-war metropolis of Baghdad through data collected and composed as a digital territory by the artist. Here, Alshaibi situates the urban environment of bustling city streets, architecture, monuments, and parks against the deceptive simplicity of life in the historic Mesopotamian Marshes of Southern Iraq, where the artist was born. Both these territories ebb and flow in this installation in a dream-like sequence. Amidst this circular viewing within the installation, the figure of Scheherazade - storyteller of the Middle Eastern collection of tales known as the “One Thousand and One Nights” - towers prominently, standing as a symbol of female survival by sheer intellectual and creative ingenuity.

Following Sama Alshaibi’s 40-year displacement from the artist’s homeland of Southern Iraq, Iihyaa’ marks Alshaibi's return, coinciding with an apocalyptic reckoning with the dying ancient Mesopotamian Marshes. Once seen crisscrossing the historic deserts and water bodies of North Africa and the Middle East throughout the Silsila series, the protagonist returns to the source of creation and civilization.

Tell it to the River manifests the legacy of time and tribulation in an embodied space of cultural meaning. Alshaibi professes and unburdens her experiences to this body of water that, too, endured and witnessed changes and destruction. At the same time, it is a vital source of regeneration, fertility and birth of life.

This exhibition debuts the commission Prelude to the Round City, inaugurating the first chapter of Sama Alshaibi's 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.

In Prelude to the Round City, Alshaibi appropriates the symbols and associations of Baghdad. The highly sentient material of daily city life saturates the installation through dense spatial records, forming significant and banal assemblages of meanings. On the one hand, the LIDAR scans are simply data measurements, the factual records of the physical environment, including the collapsing and preservation of sacred heritage sites and historic neighborhoods in rapid transition with the booming commercial development or crumbling in neglect. The scans illuminate the pursuit of everyday daily life filled with people moving across the urban terrain, the strain on the failing infrastructure with heavy traffic, making the outer margins of the city, such as simplicity expressed in the Mesopotamian Marshes and Milwiya Minaret, a utopic periphery.