Visiting Artist Lecture: Sama Alshaibi

Join us at PNCA for an artist lecture by Sama Alshaibi!
About

Sama Alshaibi’s image-based practice emerges from aftermath, shaped by fragmentation and dispossession as lived conditions of political conflict and forced migration. Working with images, data, fieldwork, and archives, she examines the ways large systems enter lived form—and how place, memory and ideology are felt, staged and contested. Recent projects position Baghdad, Iraq as a palimpsest, where rapid modernization, conflict, and survival compress multiple temporalities into the same sites. In her work, return exposes a misalignment between memory and material reality, leaving an untended city continually improvised and reassembled, where absence carries weight and even the immaterial leaves residue. Alongside this inquiry, Alshaibi often works with her own body as site and subject, using indeterminacy as method; powerful feminized representations resist visual legacies that have used the Arab female body as a pretext for subjection. Her practice also extends to the environment, treating social, built, and natural systems as interlinked sites shaped by extraction and scarcity, where speculative gestures imagine alternative orders of relation, use, and survival.Her work has been widely exhibited, including in the 55th Venice Biennale, the 13th Cairo International Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Crystal Bridges Museum of Art (State of the Art 2020), and the Barjeel Foundation (UAE). Aperture Foundation published her monograph, Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In, in 2015. Alshaibi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography (2021), the Phoenix Art Museum’s Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award (2021), the Art Matters Betty Parsons Fellowship (2023), and residencies at MacDowell (2025), at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (2024), and Artpace (2019). She is Regents Professor of Photography, Video, and Imaging at the University of Arizona.
Free & Open to the Public!
This lecture will be both livestreamed and in person.
Pacific Northwest College of Art
In the first-floor Mediatheque
511 NW Broadway, Portland, OR 97209

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Host or Publisher Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies at PNCA