Publications
Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In
Monograph published by Aperture Foundation
Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In, the first book by the artist, presents work from Silsila, a video and photographic installation that premiered at the 2013 Venice Biennale, as well as other series. Alshaibi’s lyrical multimedia work explores the landscape of conflict: the ongoing competition for land, resources, and power in the Middle East, and the internal battle for control between fear and fearlessness. Additional material, selected from the artist’s series Negative’s Capable Hands, Collapse, and Thowra, is presented in the context of Silsila, meaning “chain” or “link” in Arabic. The artist uses the desert, borders, and the body as overarching symbols of the geopolitical and environmental issues and histories, linking the Arab-speaking world.
Edited by Isabella Ellaheh Hughes, a writer, and curator based in Abu Dhabi and Honolulu, this book includes an interview between Hughes and Alshaibi, a foreword by Salwa Mikdadi, and an essay by Alfredo Cramerotti.
9 1/2 x 12 1/2 in. (24.1 x 31.8 cm)
128 pages
108 four-color photographs and video stills
Clothbound with jacket
ISBN 978-1-59711-308-3
$80.00/£55.00
purchase at Aperture
Sama Alshaibi: Tell It To The River
solo exhibition catalog published by Maraya Art Centre
This study — published in conjunction with the artist’s mid-career survey exhibition at the Maraya Art Centre — shares Sama Alshaibi’s influential oeuvre through a twenty-year odyssey of artworks and journal entries.
Forward by Dr. Nina Heydemann, primary texts by Dr. Huma Gupta and Sama Alshaibi, essay by Mo Reda, and interview with Cima Azzam.
155 pages, paperback
text published in Arabic and English
50 photographs
purchase at Maraya Art Centre
Being and Belonging
Contemporary Women Artists from the Islamic World and Beyond
Exhibition Catalog–Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
Interviews with women artists connected with the Islamic world and their compelling works that are shaping contemporary art today.
Showcasing artworks that offer political and poetic commentary on many of today’s major global issues, Being and Belonging also features powerful and intimate interviews with 25 women artists from the Islamic world and beyond. Born and living in many different countries, the artists claim space and place as equal commentators on the world we live in today. Whether addressing domestic spaces, political displacement, war, discrimination, or gender and sexuality, these artists invite us to move away from easy and schematic representations of the world. The featured artists include Sama Alshaibi, Shahzia Sikander, Dilyara Kaipova, Lubaina Himid, Manal AlDowayan, Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, and Tayeba Begum Lipi, and the works included in the book range from paintings, drawings, photography, and ceramics to mosaics, textiles, graffiti, animation, and video installations.
Edited by Fahmida Suleman, curator of the Islamic World collections at the Royal Ontario Museum.
7.75 x 10.70 in
168 Pages | 100 color + 2 b-w illus.
ISBN 9780300275094
$50
purchase at Yale University Press
Tribe: Photography and New Media from the Arab World | Issue 10
Tribe is a non-profit publication focused on documenting photography, film, and video from the Arab world.
Invested in the creative culture of the art industry, the magazine offers insight on the extensive talent within the Arab world.
As a global platform, our core mission is to create an archive and to stimulate dialogue about both emerging and established artists who are defining their practice.
Essay, cover and color reproductions: “Sama Alshaibi: Reorienting Our Gaze Choreographies of an art practice,” feature by Woodman Taylor, pp. 72-85.
Cover: Sama Alshaibi, Ma Ijtama’t Aydina ‘ala Qabdah illa wa-Kanat Mu’attalah (What our hands joined was broken) with Mu’allaqat (Suspended) in the background, from the series Silsila (2009)
purchase at Tribe
Artpace at 25: 25th Anniversary Publication
In celebration of its 25th anniversary, Artpace San Antonio has published a 272-page volume of never-before-published curatorial essays and full-color images of every exhibition created through its International Artist-in-Residence program from 2008 to 2019.
$60.00
purchase at Artpace
Sama Alshaibi:
Staging the Imagined
solo exhibition catalogue by Ayyam Gallery, Dubai.
Sama Alshaibi’s newest body of work from her solo exhibition Staging the Imagined, reflects the relationships of power and authority between photographer and subject. The work investigates how a particular historical period can alter viewers’ interpretations of photographs. Through various projects, Alshaibi reframes historical photographs and moving images that according to Grace Aneiza Ali “reference a grave historic malpractice—the role of photography, both colonial and contemporary, in reducing the body, the life, the desires, the experiences, the hopes, and dreams, indeed the very existence, of the Middle Eastern woman to a dangerous single story—one rooted in the primitive and in fear, fantasy, inferiority, and objectification.”.
Selection of quoted text from exhibition catalogue: Women’s Work: Art & Activism in the 21st Century, curated and authored by Grace Aneiza Ali (Pen + Brush Gallery, NYC, NY, 2019).
Generation after Generation was commissioned by Artpace International Artist Residency.
Carry Over was supported in part by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, Arizona Commission of the Arts, the Project Development 1st Prize Award from The Center at Santa Fe, University of Arizona and Artpace International Artist Residency.
click to view or download the catalogue
BredaPhoto Festival 2018 edition is To Infinity and Beyond, focusing on the fundamental change technology and science bring to the world around us.
Clustered in six domains; Cosmos, Intelligence, Biology, Society, God and Image, the 58 participating photographers explore the opportunities, the dangers and the dilemmas of technological progress. Picturing what’s happening in front of our eyes, or taking the liberty to make a careful prediction of what might happen next.
For the 2018 edition, the team of Dutch curators has been expanded with three international associated curators: Mohamed Somji (United Arab Emirates), Yumi Goto (Japan), and Azu Nwagbogu (Nigeria).
The festival’s publication To Infinity and Beyond contains a wide selection of work by the participating photographers with background information, an introduction on the theme, and reflective columns by the three associated curators.
T
EC059 | 220 × 297 mm | 232 p |
Otabind paperback | full-color offset | EN/NL
edition: 2250
ISBN 978-94-92051-40-0
€ 27.50
purchase at The Eriskay Connection
Suspended Territories
group exhibition catalogue published by Marta Herford Museum of Art
“The photographs and video installations of Silsila were
created over a seven-year period, and although each
scene is different from the next, a cohesive narrative is
visible among the works. Alshaibi appears in most of
its images, but remains anonymous in the symbolic role
of a migrant, or performs as an inhabitant of vivid terrain.
Adapting these vantage points, she emphasizes the link
between political unrest and environmental issues by
alluding to the psychic effects of displacement with her
body, or signaling a process of purification and rebirth
as she gestures towards the land.”
Selection of quoted text by Maymanah Farhat from the exhibition catalogue essay “Desert Life (and Death) in Sama Alshaibi’s Silsila”.
Texts: Roland, Nachtigäller, Paul Ardenne, Valerie Behiery, Marie -Laure Allain Bonilla, Gretta Louw, Maymanah Farhat, Roger Outa, Ana Siler, Sarah Zürcher
184 pages, 22 x 30 cm, paperback
Language: English, German
Publisher : Marta Herford gGmbH
Cover Art: Sama Alshaibi
Price: 32 €
purchase at Marta Herford Museum of Art
Sama Alshaibi: SILSILA, solo exhibition catalogue published by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
Sama Alshaibi’s epic series of photographs and videos is named for the Arabic word silsila, or “link”—a simple noun describing a point of connection. As a verb, “link” also describes the act of joining two discrete units. Silsila represents the joining of individuals to one another, humans with the natural world, and the self to the divine. Inspired by the intrepid fourteenth century-explorer and scholar Ibn Batūtah, Alshaibi retraced his journeys through the Middle East, North Africa, and the Maldives—a group of Southeast Asian islands threatened by rising sea levels. Silsila’s powerful images provoke contemporary questions about borders, migration, and environmental demise in relation to the human body.
Since 2009 Alshaibi has explored and documented predominantly Muslim countries. The resultant large-scale color photographs and videos record the sublime desert terrain and vast skies of countries such as Egypt, Morocco, Oman, and Palestine. Isolated amongst these spare landscapes, Alshaibi presents the feminine form as a metaphor for humanity and the natural world. Visually, Alshaibi uses jewel-like colors, geometric patterning, mirroring, and symmetry to reference the formal qualities of Islamic art traditions.
This catalogue contains installation images of the exhibition, the full exhibition checklist, and the essay "Land is Body is Home" by Claire C. Carter, Curator of Contemporary Art at SMoCA.
click to view or download the catalogue
PORTABLE NATION: 55th International Art Exhibition
la Biennale di Venezia - Maldives Pavilion
"The history of artistic aesthetics of the Maldives is not widely documented. The archipelago is rather known for its most central aesthetical topics – the supreme beauty of the ocean, ecology, and environment. The first Maldives Pavilion at 55th Venice Biennial, therefore, suggests treating the culture and nature of the Maldives as the central subject, marking its importance through its ecology, and what it would mean for the islands to disappear. Ecology and nature in the current state of global warming is no longer about national borders or certain regions. The fact that the impact of changing nature links Maldives and Venice in the environmental scenario of rising sea levels thereby became the starting point to think of an international discursive format rather than a national representation of the island nation of the Maldives in a narrow sense."
Catalog edited by: Dorian Batycka, Camilla Boemio, Alfredo Cramerotti, Aida Eltoire, published by Maretti Editore (Italy). Features an interview between Alshaibi and Isabella Ellaneh Hughes, project statement, color reproductions and installation views from Alshaibi's participation in the Maldives Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale.
23 x 27 cm
Publisher Maretti Editore
2014 – English
176 pages
Brossura binding
ISBN 978 88 89477 519
€ 40.00
purchase at Maretti Editore
We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War – an anthology edited by Nadje Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najjar. Published by Syracuse Press (NY). Alshaibi's essay "A Tale of Two Exiles" and art reproductions from In This Garden and Between Rivers are featured alongside other Iraqi artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, photographers, and activists. Recipient of the 2014 Arab American Book Prize in Non-fiction.
9.3 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
Series: Contemporary Issues in the Middle East
Hardcover: 266 pages
Syracuse University Press
2013 – English
ISBN-10: 0815633017
ISBN-13: 978-0815633013
$45.00
purchase at Syracuse Press
purchase at Amazon
View From Inside: Contemporary Arab Photography, Video and Mixed Media Art
FotoFest International, 2014, published by Schilt Publishing (Amsterdam). Features Alshaibi's duotone reproductions and statement, as well as essays by Karin Adrian von Roques, Dr. Claude W. Sui, Samer Mohdad and Mona Khazindar. The texts cover the early appearance of photography in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-nineteenth century through photography's evolution as an integral part of the contemporary Arab art world. Wendy Watriss, Senior Curator and Artistic Director for FotoFest have written the introduction.
24 x 30 cm
Schilt Publishing
2014 – English
340 pages with over 200 images in full color and duotone
ISBN: 9789053308257
€50.00
purchase at Schilt Publishing