Ahlam Shibli
Phantom Home
25 January–28 April 2013
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)
Plaça dels Àngels, 1
08001 Barcelona
Exhibition organised and produced by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA); Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto. Curated by Carles Guerra, Marta Gili, João Fernandes and Isabel Braga.
Phantom Home is a retrospective exhibition including nine photographic series produced by Ahlam Shibli (b. 1970, Palestine) during the last decade. Through a documentary aesthetic, the photographic work of Ahlam Shibli addresses the contradictory implications of the notion of home. The work deals with the loss of home and the fight against that loss, but also with restrictions and limitations that the idea of home imposes on the individuals and groups marked by repressive identity politics. Examples of places where the problematic is encountered include the occupied Palestinian areas; monuments that commemorate members of the French Resistance against the Nazis together with French fighters in the colonial wars against peoples who demanded their own independence; the bodies of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals from Oriental societies; and the communities of children in Polish orphanages. Death, Shibli’s latest photographic series, has been especially conceived for this retrospective. It shows the efforts of Palestinian society to preserve the presence of those who lost their lives fighting against the occupation.
Phantom Home encapsulates Shibli’s investigation into three different ways of understanding the word “home.” The first group of works brings together the series Eastern LGBT (2004/2006) and Dom Dziecka. The house starves when you are away (2008). While the body is considered the primary home for human beings, it also appears as the first target of identity politics. A second group includes more recent works: Trackers (2005), Trauma (2008–09) and Death (2011–12). The sequence of these series describes a colonial conflict not limited to the Palestinian land. The third group of works includes photographic series that denounce the process of land dispossession to which the Palestinians are subjected. Goter (2002–03), Arab al-Sbaih (2007) and The Valley (2007–08) are a complex testimony to quasi-humanity that also involves a critical self-reflection of the photographic procedure.
Shibli’s pictures often show the people as blurred silhouettes or with their faces covered. Hence her photography avoids the historical obsession of the medium with achieving evidence at all costs. Her photographs refuse to explain the conflict, but rather look at it in order to fight preconceptions.
Text published under a Creative Commons licence (Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported – CC BY-SA 3.0)
Activities
Friday 25 January, 5–9pm
Seminar: Conflict and Documentary Practices
Programme:
5pm: Documentary Politics in Contemporary Art
T.J. Demos, critic and reader in the Department of Art History, University College London
6pm: The Art of Disappearance: A Palestinian Variation
Esmail Nashif, anthropologist, writer and art critic, currently lecturing at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
7pm: Roundtable
With the participation of the curators of the exhibition: João Fernandes, Deputy Director at MNCARS, Madrid; Marta Gili, Director of the Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Carles Guerra, Chief Curator at MACBA; and Ulrich Loock, writer and art critic.
MACBA Auditorium. Free admission; limited seating, with simultaneous translation.
Wednesday 30 January, 7pm
Special tour
With commentary by Carles Guerra
(exclusive to the Friends of MACBA)
Museum galleries; limited places
Wednesday 6 February, 6:30pm
Conversation in the galleries
With Alberto López Bargados, anthropologist and professor at the University of Barcelona
Admission with Museum ticket
Museum galleries; limited places
Publication
Ahlam Shibli. Phantom Home. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA); Paris: Jeu de Paume; Porto: Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, 2013–14. The book includes a foreword by the curators of the show, the series Death (2011–12), and essays by T.J. Demos and Esmail Nashif. Catalogue co-published with Hatje Cantz Publishers.
Daily guided tours
(included in the admission fee)
More information at www.macba.cat and @MACBA_Barcelona #shibli.
Opening times
Weekdays 11am–7:30pm
Saturdays 10am–9pm
Sundays and public holidays 10–3pm
Closed Tuesdays (except public holidays)
