Sama Alshaibi (b. 1973, Iraq) works between photography, video, performance and installation. Her work explores the notion of aftermath: the fragmentation and dispossession that violates individuals and communities following the destruction of their social, natural, and built environments. She uses her body as both subject and medium, a site of encounter, periphery, and refuge, all the while carrying the effects of war and dislocation. Alshaibi’s powerful feminized representations resist a pretext for the subjection of Middle Eastern communities, re-calibrating, and challenging a Western and patriarchal social order.
In 2021, Alshaibi was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Photography and the recipient of the Phoenix Art Museum’s Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award. Her biennial participation includes the 55th Venice Biennale, State of the Art 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art (2020), International Art Biennial of Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia, 2020), 13th Cairo International Biennale (2019), Honolulu Biennial (2017), Qalandia International Biennial (2016), and the FotoFest Biennial (2014). She has exhibited at museums globally, including MoMA (New York), MOCA Jacksonville (Florida), Arab American National Museum (Michigan), MARTA Herford Museum (Germany), SMOCA (Arizona), the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (New York), Barjeel Foundation (Sharjah), Institut Du Monde Arabe (Paris), Bronx Museum (NYC), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver). Alshaibi’s work has also been featured at the 24th Instants Video Festival (Mexico and France), BredaPhoto International (Netherlands), and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Greece). She has received numerous awards and grants, including the Artpace International Artist-in-Residence (San Antonio, 2019), First Prize Project Development Grant from the Center (Santa Fe, 2019), and the Arab Fund for Arts & Culture Visual Arts Grant (Beirut, 2018). Her monograph, Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In (New York: Aperture, 2015), features her Silsila series. Alshaibi is a Professor of Photography, Video, and Imaging at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
More details at: https://events.unl.edu/art/2022/11/09/166955/