How did 19th- and early 20th-century colonial portraits of the Middle East and North Africa impact Western perceptions of the Islamic world and especially of women from the region? In this digital Curator Conversation, Fahmida Suleman and Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi chat with Iraqi-Palestinian artist Sama Alshaibi about the power of photography and film and how her artistic practice subverts Orientalist tropes and cliches that persist to the present day. Using colonial-era printing processes and her own body as a site to challenge inherited legacies, in this discussion, Alshaibi shares personal and collective stories of movement, migration, resilience, and determination through her recent work.

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Sama Alshaibi

Born in Iraq and now based in the United States, Sama Alshaibi is an artist working between photography, video and installation. As a scholar, she was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholar Fellowship in 2014-2015 as part of a year-long residency at the Palestine Museum in Ramallah, where Alshaibi developed an education program while conducting independent research. Her practice explores the notion of aftermath—the fragmentation and dispossession that violates the individual and a community following the destruction of their social, natural and built environment. She often complicates the coding of the Arab female figure found in the image history of photographs and moving images.

In 2021, Alshaibi was named a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of the Phoenix Art Museum's Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award. Her work has been exhibited in numerous biennales and museums, including the 55th Venice Biennale, the 2020 State of the Art (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art), Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Institut Du Monde Arabe (Paris) and Barjeel Foundation (U.A.E.), among others. In 2015, Aperture published her monograph Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In, featuring the artist’s Silsila series. Alshaibi is a Regents Professor of Art at University of Arizona, USA.

Fahmida Suleman

Dr Fahmida Suleman Suleman is Curator of the Islamic World collections at ROM and lead curator of the exhibition Being and Belonging: Contemporary Women Artists from the Islamic World and Beyond (Jul 2023 – Jan 2024). She also curated the ROM exhibition Unmasking the Pandemic: From Personal Protection to Personal Expression (2021). Formerly the Phyllis Bishop Curator for the Modern Middle East for ten years at the British Museum, her publications include Textiles of the Middle East and Central Asia: The Fabric of Life (2017) and the companion volume to Being and Belonging (2023).

Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi is the Inaugural Director of the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, is Professor of Historical Studies, History, and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. His publications include Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective (2020) and Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Nationalist Historiography (2001). 

Event captured on October 3, 2023.