Ayyam Gallery presents a new body of work by Iraqi–Palestinian artist Sama Alshaibi at this year’s Paris Photo art fair, continuing her acclaimed series Tterss (طرس).
On view from 13 to 16 November, the presentation unfolds as a layered meditation on Baghdad, its transformation, its resilience and its memory in the wake of modernisation and conflict.
In this new chapter, Sama combines mixed-media collages and video art that merge photography, LiDAR technology and archival material. Through these composite images, the artist reimagines Baghdad’s urban fabric as both a site of reconstruction and erasure, a metaphor for the broader tensions of the Arab world. The works explore what Sama calls “the elasticity of imagining versus depicting,” rendering the city as a speculative space where past and present collide.
Born in Basra to an Iraqi father and Palestinian mother, Sama’s practice often interrogates the politics of representation, displacement and gender. Working across performance, photography and installation, she frequently positions her own body as an allegorical figure to portray the byproducts of war. By using elements from personal experiences, anxieties and curiosities, Sama is able to embody different characters that address various issues and concepts.
Sama, who serves as Chair and Regents Professor of Photography, Video Art and Imaging at the University of Arizona, has exhibited widely, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris to the Honolulu Biennial and Cairo International Biennale. Her works are held in major public collections, including the Barjeel Art Foundation, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.
In 2021, she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, following a 2014 Fulbright Scholar Fellowship that supported her research at the Palestine Museum.
Through Tterss, Sama creates not a reconstruction of Baghdad, but a conversation with it, a city refracted through technology, memory and imagination. Both intimate and monumental, her work invites viewers to consider how images can rebuild what history has undone.
Visit: Sama Alshaibi Ayyam Gallery
Mariam Khawer is a Dubai-based writer and PR professional whose work spans food, art, and travel across the region. When she isn’t chasing deadlines, she’s likely at a gallery opening, testing out a new restaurant, piecing together one of her mixed-media art projects or at home with her four cats, who keep her on her toes.
