Ideas of Our Time, MOCA Jacksonville’s lecture series, presents thoughtful and engaging dialogue with artists, educators, and others around some of the most vital and important art and ideas of our time.

Sama Alshaibi’s (b. Iraq, 1973) work explores the notion of aftermath: the fragmentation and dispossession that violates individuals and communities following the destruction of their social, natural, and built environments. She often uses her body as both subject and medium, a staging site for encounters, peripheries, and refuge, even when carrying the markings of war and dislocation. The female figure in her work addresses the enduring legacy of photographic images framing the Middle East and North Africa through a gendered, subordinated position. Alshaibi’s powerful feminized representations resist a pretext for the subjection of Middle Eastern communities, while her installations and sculptures produce spatial voids to suggest the body’s absence. By physically rendering the invisibility caused by exile, her practice also memorializes those who were uprooted.

In 2021, Alshaibi was named a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of the Phoenix Art Museum’s Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award. Her biennial participation includes the 55th Venice Biennale, 2020 State of the Art (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art), 13th Cairo International Biennale (2019), Honolulu Biennial (2017), and Qalandia International (2016). She has exhibited at museums globally, including MoMA (New York), Arab American National Museum (Michigan), MARTA Herford Museum (Germany), SMOCA (Arizona), the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (New York), Barjeel Foundation (Sharjah), Institut Du Monde Arabe (Paris), Bronx Museum (NYC), and Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver). She has received numerous awards and grants, including the Artpace International Artist-in-Residence (San Antonio, 2019), First Prize Project Development Grant from the Center (Santa Fe, 2019), and the AFAC Visual Arts Grant (Beirut, 2018). Her monograph, Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In (New York: Aperture, 2015), features her Silsila series. Alshaibi is a Professor of Photography, Video, and Imaging at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS 

The national tour of State of the Art 2020 is sponsored by Bank of America with additional support from Art Bridges.

Support for this exhibition was made in part by the City of Jacksonville, the Cultural Council of Greater Jacksonville, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, The National Endowment of the Arts, and the University of North Florida.