An interview with Sama Alshaibi who recently showed work in the group show Aperture: 27,000, at Le Violon Bleu, London

Reem Fekri: Female Arab artists usually work with notions of stereotyping, gender and the current or past political situation within the region. However, you work with your history as well. What I find interesting is that you encompass some very intimate and personal family details within your artistic practice. Your hybrid identity (half Iraqi, half Palestinian) and your connections with the Diaspora emerge in your work through your emotionally charged photographs. Can you describe your conceptual processes when you first started producing and how this has developed? How do you translate these experiences within your work?

Sama AlshaibiSama Alshaibi: I think I am a person that relates to the world in small packages, on a scale that can be contained by an anecdotal story. Although history, politics and society fascinates me, I am not interested in dogmatic opinions presented as fact. I often think that there are multiple truths within every fact. My art is a place these truths can be negotiated and suggested. Sometimes they are my families stories, sometimes they are my own experiences while other times they are the plight of my people. Often they are all of these things in the same space.

War and occupation has defined my life, my location(s) and my relationship to my national and individual identity. In the beginning, I was largely interested in articulating the human impact of war, but from (what I thought would be) a more objective point of view. I wanted to be a war photojournalist. But because of my problematic passport (at the time, I was still an Iraqi citizen but living in the USA), I couldn't travel anywhere. In order to discuss war, I could only talk about my own experiences, or those of my family. It sort of forced me to be more conceptual and suggestive. But then I found that the elusiveness or the impreciseness of art actually was more honest and truthful when discussing the impact of war.

Through art, I could incorporate multiple and conflicting truths in ways in which  ‘documentation’ cant - especially when I studied the history of war photography, and realized the amount we understood about war was under false pretence of the camera and the photographer. At times it was staged. So, by telling my story, or my own experiences, I felt I had the authority to say what I wanted. I find it incredibly problematic to visually articulate the experience of others suffering in a single photograph. I would want to write a caption the size of a novel.

Sama AlshaibiEventually I received the American passport and started to frequent Palestine and the Middle East. This shifted my practice quite a bit, because so much of my work is based on my own experiences. That includes the stories of the people I meet. These stories live in my imagination, in my dreams, and make their way into my work. I don't learn from books as much I learn from sharing time with others, witnessing their lives and swapping stories. So my process is just a re -presenting of these stories. They too form a type of witnessing. Susan Sontag argues that when the audience reflects on images of suffering sincerely, they become a witness themselves. So this cycling of storytelling and witnessing through art is my process that hopefully my audience is a part of too.

RF: The world often accepts and is accustomed to binary classifications – however, with your hybrid identity how do you try and overcome or avoid these in your work?

SA: I agree that the world projects simple labels and categories, rather than preferring to deal with absolute truths. And I should say that  ‘hybridity’ is inherently natural to my thinking and emotional state, and not an intellectual or theoretical exercise I practice with purpose. It doesn't extend from my artwork, but rather, extends into my artwork because of who I am.

In very ordinary experiences, such as conversations with a taxi driver in Ramallah, or with a student of mine here in the USA, hybridity reveals itself. I feel I am blessed (cursed?) with this role of explaining, defining, or suggesting another possibility from the "other" side. It is like a middle kid syndrome of some type (which I am, by the way), a kind of negotiator.  I often understand the "other" side, I understand how it often thinks, and I understand the side I am speaking with, how they think. So I can make this argument pretty effectively. Actually, sometimes I understand neither group. But my point is that I'm always stuck in this internal discussion with myself, a negotiation of trying to figure things out even before there is an audience to contemplate. So it just naturally comes out in my work, in subject, in formal decisions and in meaning. But it is fluid, not a fixed method I incorporate on purpose.

RF: In your work ‘And Other Interruptions’ you describe some rather frustrating experiences at airports – and I think a lot of foreigners in the West can empathize with this, particularly post 9/11 where the situation seems to be magnified. You describe, rather fondly, how your passport reads like a story of ‘a shifty wanderer, a hyphenated profile that doesn’t fit in tidy spectrums of security risks.’ Do you think your work would have been entirely different if it were not for your experiences in day-to-day life?

Sama AlshaibiSA: Not fondly! I hate borders, because everything that is wrong with classifications comes to light at borders. And I just sit there for hours waiting for these moronic agents to figure out them I am no threat to them. I actually have a recurring nightmare that I am stuck at the Israeli-Jordan border, unable to get in, unable to get out. I'm making a project about it.

And it is no better for me at the US border, even though I am a citizen. Sure my work would be different if not for these experiences. My work is largely built upon my experiences. But regardless, I think the camera would always be in front of my face. I almost don't even know how to experience life without a camera. Sometimes I force myself to leave my camera at home, but I usually regret that. Even though the bulk of my work is not documentary, I document almost everything. 

RF: You explore the gift of freedom in your video work ‘All I Want For Christmas.’ A difficult yet pensive piece to watch, you explore the notion of Israel giving the gift of the sea to Palestinians during the Christmas period – whereby Palestinians apply for permission papers to enter Israel and visit the sea. The aesthetic of your work is continuously and flawlessly beautiful, yet you fail to show the anger and frustration behind it through experiences such as these. How do you manage this?

SA: I would argue that the anger and frustration is present, it is imprinted on the surfaces of the land itself. The video presents a split screen, the left side an uninterrupted visual of the sea. There are no cuts, no edits. Just the water moving gently. The right side, the surfaces of a refugee camp in the West Bank. The camera closely explores the camp and surrounding area: the rough impact of poverty and suffering of the crumbling surfaces of homes and streets, the massive amounts of graffiti expressing outrage and pain, the demolished homes (by Israeli Defense Forces), the continual sounds of construction over the lapping sounds of water at the shore, and the image of the Apartheid wall hovering in the distance, obstructing the drivers view.

The land and place itself is the incarcerated body, violated and deteriorating under occupation. The land is evidence of that anger. 

But I am not interested in only expressing anger and outrage, and especially not through the screams of despair. I think most Americans wrongly understand such expressions, and it feeds into their misconceptions about Palestinians and their temperament. The Palestinian persona is so crudely depicted in the west. It is angry, hostile, violent, and utterly tragic.

When I watch video clips on Al Jazeerah, showing the Palestinian resistance, I often think about this misunderstanding. What Arabs perceive as fortitude, resiliency, and strength is completely misunderstood in the US. Perhaps it is because Americans can't understand the Arabic language, and the visual symbols of resistance have been negatively defined by Western media. But regardless, for me, it isn't a useful tool to continue to work within the logic of polarized perceptions. I want to push past that in my work, otherwise, I'm acting more as a journalist than an artist.

So when the boy reaches the shore in my video, he simply sits and stares out into the sea. A simple desire for freedom. When the girl reaches the shore (all of the annexed bodies of water are captured in this video), she dances. This is my expression of freedom, that in spite of the worlds' collaboration in Palestine's incarceration, the body will always resist incarceration. It craves and seeks freedom, even if only through movement (like dancing). It is a human instinct. This is what Israel cannot understand. This is why the Occupations policies continue to fail.

RF: You uncover, rather intimately, the secrets of your family’s history through examining the loss of location, culture and bloodlines in the series ‘In This Garden.’ Through incredible imagery, performed by your cousins and you, an exploration of your grandfathers wishes to be reunited with family that have fled Palestine and his desire to be buried in his Palestinian village (which was forbidden) are processed in this series. Delicate handwriting is placed near the photographs making the final image replicate something from a long lost, forgotten era. By uncovering an intimate family portrait what do you hope your work will achieve in the current and on going political situation?

SA: This project was made during an incredibly painful period in my life. It isn't easy for me to speak about it in an interview. I think that is why I made art about it. I can't easily define that time or the work itself, but perhaps I can suggest the moment's trials, so to consider the overlapping forces at work within the images.

The work was made in the summer of 2006. America's war with Iraq was at its peak, completely devastating, and my family still living there were deeply suffering. We just lost our grandfather's home in Baghdad, a home my family worked diligently to keep in the family even though most had fled Iraq over the past 20 years. For a Palestinian family that already lost their home in Palestine, this was the most terrible injustice. We felt we had failed my deceased grandfather somehow. But we were powerless to stop it, just as he was 60 years ago when driven out of Jaffa.

During this same period, Israel was waging a war on two fronts, Gaza and Lebanon. I  traveled to Palestine with some of my family that now live in the USA (the girls in the images are my cousins), taking them to my grandfather's boyhood village of Budrus. My younger brother passed away earlier that summer, and the story unfolds in the image, "Death Wish".

I buried a lock of my brother's hair and the dirt from his gravesite in Chicago on top of my great grandmother's grave in Budrus (where my grandfather wanted to be buried). My brother wanted to be buried in Iraq. So there was these swapping around of unfilled wishes and natural elements from the lands we left, and those we now live on...water from the Tigris River in Iraq, dirt and sand from the different gravesites in Chicago and Budrus, and the journey required during a time of war. Wars separated us from each other, displaced us from our land, and there were contemporary wars that continued to afflict us and our people. There were no paths out.

All of these painful trajectories played upon each other, and collapsed into the project. The cycles of injustice just played themselves out in tighter orbits that summer, and I had no where to put it, except in the work. I guess I wanted to tell the world the reality of war.  Here is another way to look at your war, your justified war, your unfortunate but "necessary" war, your "no choice" but to have war. Here are its effects. 
But here is something else to consider; as an artist, I'm not necessarily thinking about an audience when I make certain works. This particular project was my private grieving. The exhibition walls is a very distant and obscure idea in the making of such work, and I don't necessarily factor how much public scrutiny I am inviting into my life. It is only much later that I realize the implications of my decisions, and this case, how I've opened my mourning to judgment.  I sometimes cringe when I see images from "In This Garden" in public. I remember that summer and I feel exposed. But then people connect to it, and share with me dark spaces from their own lives. I realize the power art can have when it risks so much. I trust that, even if it can be uncomfortable. 

RF: Your work is unique and delicate. It appears that you are driven by a desire to show a voice to the Palestinian and Iraqi people, and of Arabs in general. How do you think your work falls in the current art market – a market driven by commercialism and consumerism?

SA:   The market is a flat concept to me. I wouldn't even know how evaluate myself in it. Maybe you can get back to me in 30 years about this one!

Image courtesy of Artist
©Sama Alshaibi, Olives From Gaza: the bitter dream,
Pigment print on Velvet Fine Art, 23 inches x 29.5 inches, 2004

© Sama Alshaibi, Rotten Fruit, Pigment print on Cranes Silver Rag, 23 inches x 24 inches, 2006

© Sama Al Shaibi, Say Nothing, Pigment print of Velvet Fine Art, 20 x 20 inches, 2008

 

 

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