An Act of Possession
An Act of Possession is constructed from a travel trunk first manufactured in 1948, the year of the Nakba and the founding of the modern state of Israel. Hollowed out and stripped of function, the trunk becomes a transparent shell: a container unable to contain, a frame for belongings that can no longer be carried.
The work considers possession as both material and political. Homeland, home, documents, keepsakes, and personal objects may appear portable, but displacement reveals the limits of what can be transported, claimed, or kept. In Alshaibi’s altered trunk, the object associated with travel and storage becomes an index of dispossession, absence, and the fragile architecture of belonging.
An Act of Possession crystallized a spatial language of absence that would return throughout Alshaibi’s later work. Through transparency, emptiness, and the object’s exposed interior, absence becomes not only a subject, but a material and spatial condition.
An Act of Possession
2019
Repurposed aluminum and wood travel trunk from 1948
26.5 × 17 × 8.5 in.
Originally commissioned by Artpace San Antonio, Texas.