Exhibition statement - Sama Alshaibi


Peace is not simply an absence of violence…

What is most denied to Palestinians by the international media is the ability to communicate their own story to a world that noted scholar Edward Said described as “hypnotized by a mythological Zionist narrative of an empty Palestine.” In effect, Palestinians have been denied the “permission to narrate” their own story. Palestinians have been historically powerless to combat propaganda that asserts that Palestine was a convenient, empty land waiting for the return of Jews persecuted in Europe for centuries. The creation of the state of Israel resulted in the expulsion of 4 million Palestinians now living in the Diaspora.  Millions more have been internally displaced within their own country. The media’s largest triumph, however, is the reduction of the Palestinian persona into a single crude terrorist 'body'.

This propaganda is perhaps most palpable in mediated attitudes about mothers whose sons kill in the cause for nationhood. The perception exists that Palestinian mothers are suicide bomber producing machines, while mothers of Israeli and American soldiers are revered as noble, civic minded and models of patriotism.  This complex of perceptions prompted me to contemplate my own pregnancy this past year because I am a half Iraqi-half Palestinian mother of two American boys.

Freedom fighter, terrorist, soldier, insurgent, peacekeeper…this conundrum of perception taking place in my womb was a microcosm of the agenda of righteousness played out in modern day politics. My son’s male gender allows for the leasing of his body to kill and die for governments and in the interest of political ideology.  All my maternal instincts are powerless to protect his life when compared to the future he will be forced to inherit because of his national identity.

The poet laureate of Palestine, Mahmoud Darwish asks, “Where do the birds fly after the last sky?”  My strategy lies within my art making.

The dowry money headdress is an artifact now lost to our culture. Fashioned after my mother’s faint memory of her grandmother’s, our collaborative effort constructs a memorial to our family’s continual migrations. Substituting the no longer minted Palestinian currency with coins embossed with our visas, passport stamps and pictures, suggests an intellectual dowry rather than a monetary or economic one.  My inheritance is confined to the memories of my elders, teetering on the brink of obliteration.

My images act as a visual objection to the denial of our national identity and humanity.  By utilizing the loose graffiti writing style over the pregnant belly, the work alludes to the architectural walls inside the West Bank where a dialogue of written protest takes place. The writing on the surface of my skin connects me to the surfaces of our land.

My journey to Palestine and Israel, in an attempt to relocate my grandmother’s home, is captured in my video. My hope was to offer her a link back to her fading memories but resulted into a realization of my own sense of belonging. My abstracted notion of my Palestinian identity, a collection of handed down memories and transferred desires, was replaced with a dynamic relationship to the land and people I met there.

The inspiration for this work came from my mother, who recreated her mother’s wedding dress when she remarried a few years back. The original vanished during forced migrations, one of the countless examples of our heritage lost to exile. My mother’s recreation of the wedding dress was a key to our past, linking our present to a time before we were refugees, exiles and terrorists. The wedding dress, much like the work exhibited here, defies attempts to obliterate our history and who we collectively are.

There is a land called Palestine and I am one of her daughters….



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