Ayyam Gallery, Maraya Art Centre host Sama Alshaibi’s works on exile
- 06 May 2023
Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer
Ayyam Gallery is currently hosting Tell it to the River (Feb. 27 – June 30), Sama Alshaibi’s mid-career survey curated by Mo Reda and Cima Azzam, at Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah.
It is an exhibition of the Iraqi-Palestinian artist’s mapping 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 citizenship, as a result of war and migration.
The show debuts two commissions: Prelude to the Round City, inaugurating the first chapter of Alshaibi’s 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, and Iihyaa (Restoration), the closing chapter of her project Silsila, from 2009 — 2017.
Prelude 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.
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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 she was born. Both the territories ebb and flow in the installation in a dream-like sequence. Amidst the 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 through sheer intellectual and creative ingenuity. Following Alshaibi’s 40-year displacement from her Southern Iraq homeland, Iihyaa marks her 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 in the Silsila series, the protagonist returns to the source of creation and civilisation.
Tell it to the River bridges an encounter of Alshaibi’s past and present works and speaks of a displaced body which time-travels in multiple states of consciousness. It is an ever-evolving process of shedding, repeating, returning, and reliving. The artist lives in the memory of the past, is an alien in the present, who repeatedly constructs a home and identity. The exhibition thus manifests the legacy of time and tribulation in spaces that have been enriched by cultural meaning.
Alshaibi’s personal experience relates to the 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. Her multimedia work explores spaces of conflict and the power struggles that arise in the aftermath of war and exile. She is particularly interested in how such clashes occur between citizens and the State, creating tangled crises that impact the physical and psychic levels of an individual as resources and land, mobility, political agency and self-affirmation, are forced into compromise.
Silsila — Arabic for ‘chain’ or ‘link’— is a multi-media project depicting Alshaibi’s cyclic journey through the significant deserts and endangered water sources of the Middle East and North African region. As a Palestinian-Iraqi exiled from two homelands, she spent her formative years moving from country to country as a political refugee. The displacements prompted the language of exile, transnational migration and border-erasing in her work. She constructs her diaspora-centric production with imaginative narratives of social, economic and political upheavals, specifically those relating to the displaced, while also drawing attention to the impending uprooting of peoples. In her eight-year project, Silsila (photography, video and installation, 2009 – 2017), Alshaibi re-traces history in the present and speaks about mass human migrations due to increasing water scarcity and rising tides, in an era of catastrophic climate change. Her series narrates the story of water and deserts — both real and imagined. Inspired by the great 14th century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, Alshaibi loosely followed his ancient paths through the present-day Middle East and North Africa and beyond.
Embracing concepts from the Islamic mystic tradition of Sufism, Alshaibi’s titles are spiritually evocative: Wasl (Union), Al-Tariqah (The Path), Silsila (Chain, Link or Connection, often used in the sense of lineage or spiritual genealogy, where a Sufi Master passes on her gifts and techniques to her spiritual descendants). Silsila takes its inspiration from Sufi poet Assadi Ali, who began each line of his poems with the words “I, the Desert”. An excerpt from his poem calls for us to recognise a common identity: “the grains of my sand rush in asking/begging You (Allah) to keep my descendants/and nation united”.
A story of shared history and soon-to-be-written future, Wasl and Al-Tariqah narrates stories of the climate refugee through its geographic voice, and our search for connection with each other as peoples and nations, plagued by a possibly uncertain future. Alshaibi notes that geological interconnectedness and the resulting human interdependence is essential to addressing environmental issues. Ibn Battuta is identified as the greatest Muslim traveller, having covered more ground than Marco Polo in his journeys from Morocco to as far as China. But while Ibn Battuta had a choice to move and explore, refugees do not have this facility. Through performance, video, photography and installation, the artist positions her own body as an allegorical site that makes the byproducts of war visible. Born in Basra to an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother, Alshaibi is based in the United States, where she is Chair and Professor of Photography and Video Art at the University of Arizona, Tucson.