Silsila

Silsila — Arabic for “chain” or “link” — is a multimedia project developed over seven years through the deserts and endangered water sources of the Middle East, North Africa, the Maldives, and Hawaiʻi. Through photography, video, and installation, Alshaibi follows the story of water and desert as a way to think about displacement in an era of ecological crisis.

The project was inspired in part by the journeys of the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta. Alshaibi loosely followed his historic routes through the present-day Middle East and North Africa and beyond. But where Ibn Battuta moved by choice, Silsila turns toward those for whom movement is forced. The work speaks to refugees, displaced communities, and those facing future uprooting through water scarcity and rising seas.

In Silsila, landscape is not a backdrop. Desert and water become active forces that hold memory, danger, survival, and connection. The recurring figure in the work moves through these spaces as a seeker and a witness. Her presence links the body to the land and makes visible the fragile relationship between human life and the natural world.

The project draws on the visual and philosophical traditions of Islamic art and Sufism. Its use of saturated color, symmetry, pattern, and spiritually evocative titles points to ideas of lineage, transmission, and interdependence. Titles such as Wasl (Union), Al-Tariqah (The Path), and Silsila suggest a chain of relation across bodies, places, histories, and futures.

Silsila asks what it means to recognize our shared vulnerability before ecological collapse. It is a project about the climate refugee before that condition has fully arrived, and about the search for connection in the face of an increasingly uncertain future.

Silsila
2009–2017
Photography, video, and installation

42 photographs: digital archival prints and chromogenic prints mounted to Diasec
8 videos: projected or presented in custom black Plexiglas boxes

Published as the monograph Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In by Aperture Foundation in 2015.

“Sama Alshaibi uses photography to situate her performance art, which is independent of an audience, and that performance—an abstract manifestation of her personal and intimate experiences—gives a new dimension to her artistic practice. Unlike the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, who is often referenced in Silsila, Alshaibi does not document the moment but rather lives it, in order to become one with a landscape threatened by ecological disasters. There are hardly any living beings in her images; instead, traces of life—the fruits of paradise, such as pomegranate seeds and dates, and the white feathers of birds—lend her images a spiritual and meditative quality that she shares with the viewer.”

Salwa Mikdadi, excerpt from “Silsila: A Desert Ritual and Spiritual Performance Independent of an Audience”, Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In)