Visiting Artist Lecture: Sama Alshaibi

Mar 31, 2022 5PM-6PM

Join us for a conversation with Visiting Artist Sama Alshaibi who will be visiting Anderson Ranch from March 28 – April 9, 2022.

Visiting Artist Lectures are free and open to the public. Registration is required. Can’t make it in person? Register for the event and receive a link to live-stream the lecture virtually.

Sama Alshaibi’s photographs and videos situate her own body as a site of performance in consideration of the social and gendered impacts of war and migration. Her work complicates the coding of the Arab female figure found in the image history of photographs and moving images. Alshaibi’s sculptural installations evoke the disappearance of the body and act as counter-memorials to war and forced exile. Alshaibi’s monograph, Sand Rushes In, was published by Aperture, NYC. It features her 8-year Silsila series (debuted at the 55th Venice Biennale), which probes the human dimensions of borders, migration, and ecological demise.

In 2021, Alshaibi was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Photography. Her biennial participations include the 55th Venice Biennale (Italy), 21st International Art Biennial of Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia, 2020), 13th Cairo International Biennale (Egypt, 2019), 2017 Honolulu Biennial (Hawaii), 2016 Qalandia International Biennial (Haifa), and 2014 FotoFest Biennial, Houston. She was also selected for the ‘State of The Art 2020’ (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art/the Momentary, Arkansas, 2020), and recently held solo exhibitions at Ayyam Gallery (Dubai, 2019) and at Artpace, where she participated as the National Artist in Residence (San Antonio, 2019). Alshaibi received the first prize Project Development Award from the Center (Santa Fe, 2019), and the 2017 Visual Arts Grant from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (Beirut). Other solo exhibitions include the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, NY (2017), SMoCA, AZ (2016); and Ayyam Gallery, London (2015). Her over 150 group exhibitions include Pen + Brush Gallery (NYC, 2019), American University Museum (Washington D.C., 2018), Marta Herford Museum of Art, Germany (2017), CCS Bard Hessel Museum and Galleries, New York (2017), Museum De Wieger, The Netherlands (2017), Arab American National Museum, Michigan (2015). She has also exhibited at MoMA (NYC), Bronx Museum (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), the 24th Instants Video Festival (Mexico and France), and Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Greece). Born in Basra to an Iraqi father and Palestinian mother, Sama Alshaibi is Professor and Co-Chair of the Photography, Video and Imaging program at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Anderson Ranch requires masks to be worn inside buildings on campus.