contact Sama Alshaibi at samaraena@gmail.comArtist Statement
I am an artist born in Basra, Iraq to an Iraqi father and Palestinian mother. My work negotiates the shifts between personal and family history, creating a context to understand the impact of war and exile through family stories serve as more than an historical archive and authoritative record. My mother and her family were displaced to Iraq nearly 60 years ago as a consequence of Al-Nakba. For over 23 years now, the members of my mother and my father’s families have been fleeing Iraq one by one. The effects of three wars have dissolved our collective will to stay in our country. Today, only a handful of family members remain, trapped in a violent conflict, unable to find a country to let them in.
In my work, I use the first person narrative to perform individual and communal memories that help inform my audience of our collective identity, one that restores our humanity and resists the injustice of our past and present. My work honors the lives of the “characters” I perform, such as mother and grandmother, whose strength and wits contributed to the survival of the family and defies stereotypes of the oppressed and weak Arab woman.
My creative research also extends into areas of collective trauma and how the role of memory containers (such as art) and memorials are used as vehicles to resist the effacement and obliteration of that history. As a Palestinian-Iraqi, my identity is rooted in a violent and traumatic past that is still being afflicted; to situate that history in the present not only provides context to my audience, but also connects me from my safety zone in the US back into the red zone of Iraq or Occupied territories of Palestine. Even when I’m performing events past, such as our escape from Basra in 1981 in my film Goodbye to the Weapon, there is a sense that this story is ongoing; there are only circles, no lines to a path out.
Major Projects Include:
And Other Interruptions
2007 (Photography)As a migrant from third world states adversarial to the US and Israel, my body’s presence at their borders causes a predictable disturbance. Similarly, my body’s presence at the borders of Arab countries raises suspicion due to my US nationality and the stamps of numerous Israeli entry and exit visas. The honest answers to questions about my travels are always unsatisfying, and my presence is disconcerting to those who police these boundaries. Like many immigrants, my life will always reflect the crossings back and forth between motherland and new land as I attempt to remain close and connected to my culture, family, and friends. But for first world nations, my passport reads like the story of a shifty wanderer, a hyphenated profile that doesn’t fit in tidy spectrums of security risks. Like many, I simply don’t fit into polarized binaries that shape the perceptions of border agents.
All I Want For Christmas
2007 (Video)During the Christmas season in the West Bank, Palestinians apply for permission papers to enter Israel. Their wish is to see the sea. Access to all three, the Dead, Red, and Mediterranean, are annexed under Israeli control. Suhair reacts to seeing the Mediterranean Sea in France: “My tears start falling, I start crying…here I can touch the sea, and I can hear the waves in South of France, but it Palestine, I can’t….this is what is so hard… that you are refugee in your own country; you can’t move, you can’t go, you can’t feel, you can’t breath in your country…”
In All I want For Christmas, Suhair’s refugee camp, Dheisheh, and the Separation Wall, become symbols for the dismalness of the occupation and are juxtaposed to the serenity of the sea. Because of a Christmas “gift” from Israel, three shores are reached and celebrated in dance, the Palestinian body in freedom.
In This Garden
2006 (Photography and Text)
In This Garden" uncovers the secrets of my family's history by mourning the losses of location, culture, and bloodlines. It's marked by the unfilled wishes of my grandfather who died in 1983 in Baghdad. His hopes to reunite with his children who escaped to the US or Jordan were lost, his wishes to be buried in his village in Palestine next to his mother and his sister were forbidden, and his dream for peace for Iraq and Palestine were never realized in his lifetime and continues to elude his people and us, his family. In my project, my cousins and I perform his wishes and give voice to our current struggles as Iraqis, Palestinians, and Arabs Muslims struggling to hold onto our heritage in the West, and to continue his legacy with honor.I.D.
2006 (Performance/Video)A video short of performance art filmed at the Bethlehem “Security Barrier”, just steps away from the site of the heavily armed Bethlehem checkpoint, and access to Israel. The performance ritual meditates on water and land rights, national and personal identity, and their relationship to freedom and access.
My Apartheid Vacation
2006 (Photography and Video)My Apartheid Vacation is a multi-media travelogue of my journey through the Holy Land, offering a point of entry to the Palestinian incarceration. I exploit American privilege to access contested and segregated landscape and sites (the Dead Sea, Mediterranean Sea, beaches, mountains, highways, historical church/mosque access, etc.), as well as undesirable land (refugee camps, checkpoints, bypass roads) in both Israel and Occupied Palestine. The project interrupts the benign pilgrimage experience, forcing the tourist to witness the ghettoized and barricaded landscape.
Birthright (memory work in the Palestinian Diaspora)
2004-2005 (Photography)Birthright are a series of self portraits shot with a 4x5 camera. Images of the pregnant Palestinian mother stands as a symbol to the future of a people under occupation or in exile. The project examines the struggles of the internally and externally displaced Palestinian people and culture.
Where The Birds Fly
2005 (Documentary Diary Video)Where the Birds Fly (recently screed at Mizna Third Annual Arab Film Festival), chronicles my journey to Palestine to locate my grandmother's home and to offer her and my mother a link to their fading memories. Along the way, I find my abstracted notion of my Palestinian identity, handed down memories and transferred desires, replaced by a new dynamic relationship to the land and the people I meet.
Zaman: I Remember
2002-2004 (Photography)Photomontages inspired by a complex personal history involving my continual migration through the Middle East and America. Aesthetically, formally and conceptually, this body of work stresses the intersections of my Iraqi/Palestinian, Arab/American and Islamic/Christian cultures.
Goodbye To The Weapon
2004 (Video)Goodbye to the Weapon is an experimental short that reflects on the last moments my mother spent before attempting to flee the Iraq/Iran war with her four small children. Shot on Super 8 and mixed with old family Super 8 footage.
Milsma - The Place to Be – Soiled Live – Music for Ruins
(collaboration with G(riot) & Joe Farbrook)
2003-2005 (LIVE Experimental Video and Musical Performances)Designed for live performances, these collections of time-based media are a new slant on the music video mixed with spoken word and a DJ. Rich with colorful montage and metaphor, these works are cognitive maps of a futuristic sphere where the political and social arenas blend land, race, religion and sex into a dizzying dreamscape thundering with the immediacy and texture of rap.
Diatribes (collaboration with Joe Farbrook)
2003 (Interactive DVD)The Diatribes DVD is a simultaneous interview between Joe Farbrook (German/Jewish descent) and Sama Alshaibi (Iraqi/Palestinian) as they try to grapple with the war with Iraq, a war that the American government has waged, and which every American must share responsibility. Entangled in the mix is a sampling of the media being broadcast during the build-up as well as various protest demonstrations happening during this time-span. Viewers are asked to choose which audio track to listen to and create their own live mix of the four points of view.
