Exhibition Details

Tell it to the River is an exhibition of Iraqi-Palestinian artist Sama Alshaibi, mapping a journey of a twenty-year practice. The works portray experiences of displacement, revolving around the social circumstances of an individual exiled from a city, a country and a citizenship as a result of war and migration.
This exhibition debuts two commissions; Prelude to the Round City, inaugurating the first chapter of Sama Alshaibi’s 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, and Iihyaa (Restoration), the closing chapter of Alshaibi’s project Silsila* from 2009 - 2017.
Prelude to the Round City is an immersive, circular installation generated by LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scans, a technology originally developed for military targeting. The installation encapsulates Iraq’s post-war metropolis of Baghdad through data collected and composed as a digital territory by the artist. Here, Alshaibi situates the urban environment of bustling city streets, architecture, monuments and parks against the deceptive simplicity of life in the historic Mesopotamian Marshes of Southern Iraq where the artist was born. Both these territories ebb and flow in this installation in a dream-like sequence. Amidst this circular viewing within the installation, the figure of Scheherazade - storyteller of the Middle Eastern collection of tales known as the 'One Thousand and One Nights' – towers prominently, standing as a symbol of female survival by sheer intellectual and creative ingenuity.
Following Sama Alshaibi’s 40-year displacement from the artist’s homeland of Southern Iraq, Iihyaa,’ marks Alshaibi’s return, coinciding with an apocalyptic reckoning with the dying ancient Mesopotamian Marshes. Once seen crisscrossing the historic deserts and water bodies of North Africa and the Middle East throughout the Silsila series, the protagonist returns to the source of creation and civilisation.
Bridging an encounter of Alshaibi’s past and present works, Tell it to the River speaks of a displaced body time-travelling in multiple states of consciousness in an ever-evolving process of shedding, repeating, returning, and reliving. Living in the memory of the past, alien in the present, and repeatedly constructing a home and identity.
Tell it to the River manifests the legacy of time and tribulation in an embodied space of cultural meaning. Alshaibi professes and unburdens her experiences to this body of water that, too, endured and witnessed changes and destruction. At the same time is a vital source of regeneration, fertility and birth of life.