Sama Alshaibi
Sama Alshaibi is a Palestinian-Iraqi artist whose work incorporates photography, video and installation. Her practice explores the notion of aftermath—the fragmentation and dispossession that violates the individual and a community following the destruction of their social, natural and built environment. In her photographs and videos, Alshaibi often uses her own body as both subject and medium, a staging site for encounters and refuge, even when carrying the markings of war and dislocation. In several of her projects, Alshaibi complicates the coding of the Arab female figure found in the image history of photographs and moving images.
Alshaibi is a Guggenheim Fellow, 2023 Art Matters Betty Parsons Fellow and the 2021 recipient of the Phoenix Art Museum's Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award. Her exhibitions include the 55th Venice Biennale, the 2020 State of the Art (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, AK), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), and the Barjeel Foundation (U.A.E.), among others. In 2015, Aperture published her monograph Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In, featuring the artist’s Silsila series. Alshaibi is based in the United States, where she is a Regents Professor of Photography, Video and Imaging at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
