Ahlam Shibli

Ahlam Shibli's photo works are a complex testimony to the presence and absence of a home. Using documentary procedures, Shibli has developed a body of work eschewing the objectivity associated with photojournalism. Rather than visual evidence, her photographic practice involves a conversational engagement with the subjects. Each series encapsulates the knowledge obtained through an empirical contact with colonialism and conflict while eluding climax and drama often deployed by media representations.[17]

Series such as Goter (2002–03), Arab al-Sbaih (2007) and The Valley (2007–08) are informed by a topographic character. Shibli's views of landscapes, towns, precarious settlements, interiors, and exteriors, as well as cemeteries, exhibit an accumulation of signs that reveal the effects of the Israeli rule over the land. An outstanding example of this complex narrative is Trackers (2005), a series of photographs concerned with young Arab men who decide to enroll in the Israeli army. In the artist's own words, the project investigates the price paid by a colonized minority to a majority of colonizers, so they can be accepted, change their identity, survive, or perhaps all of this and more.[17]

More recent works such as Trauma (2008–09) have confronted the ambiguous nature of colonialism and occupation and the relentless search for the meanings of home. Starting with commemorations of the atrocious massacre at Tulle that took place on 9 July 1944, Shibli reflects on the paradox of a population that resisted the German occupation, only to embark a few years later on a colonial war in Indochina and Algeria. Series such as this, or the one dedicated to the daily life in Polish orphanages, Dom Dziecka. The house starves when you are away (2008), or Eastern LGBT (2006), in which Shibli documents the lives of transsexual communities, extend her modus operandi beyond the Palestinian issue.[17]

In the series Death (2011–12), a pivotal work in this exhibition, Shibli explores some of the ways in which the absent ones are present again – 're-presented': Palestinian fighters who fell in the course of their armed resistance against an Israeli incursion, victims of the Israeli military killed under different circumstances (Shahid), men and women who exploded themselves to assassin Israelis (Istishhadi), or the prisoners who in very global terms might be considered failed martyrs.[17]

The numerous representations of martyrs are the visual motif that allows Shibli to reveal how the Palestinian community structures the public and domestic sphere around these absent figures and their death. Often reduced to iconic reproductions that flatten bodies and faces in the name of national identity politics, the compulsive proliferation of memorials bears testimony to the phantomatic nature of home.[17]

2007

• Goter, and Trackers, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee[18]

2006

• Trackers, Max Wigram Gallery, London; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Herzliya; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel

2003

• Lost Time: Unrecognised, Self-Portrait, and Goter, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham [cat.][1]
• Goter, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv [cat.]

2002

• Positioning, Hagar Art Gallery, Jaffa [cat.]
• Unrecognised, el Kahif Gallery, Bethlehem
• Five Senses, The Acco Festival of Alternative Israeli Theatre, Acre

2000

• Unrecognised, al Matal Cultural Center, Ramallah; Heinrich Böll Foundation, Tel Aviv [cat.]

1999

• Wadi Salib in Nine Volumes, French Cultural Center, Ramallah; Heinrich Böll Foundation, Tel Aviv [cat.]