Artist Sama Alshaibi returned to Baghdad after 40 years of being separated from her homeland, a landscape that felt foreign after decades of being apart. Allowing her experiences to manifest in the form of art, through mixed media collages specifically, Alshaibi narrates a story of the city and its people - “a city that lives in the imagination of many - obsessed over, mythologised, often misunderstood,” Alshaibi remarks. When asked about her choice of medium, she explains how it was the process of bringing together contradictions that dictated the selection. “What I experienced were fragments: an overheard story, a demolished site, a remembered coffee shop, a building barely holding its form. That’s why collages felt right. It wasn’t about representing the city - it was about assembling the contradictions. It lets the archival sit beside the speculative, the personal next to the historical.”
With her project, titled طرس (Tterss), meaning palimpsest, Alshaibi delves into the experience of returning to Baghdad, a city where she faced the task of reorientation after her displacement as a child during the Iraq-Iran War, followed by years of being blacklisted. “Returning to Baghdad wasn’t a homecoming but a confrontation with time. I had carried an imagined city with me for four decades, shaped by memory, exile and inherited narratives. What I found was a city suspended, at once paused in time and radically altered. The difficulty wasn’t just in depicting the Baghdad I remembered or the one I encountered upon return, but in accepting that both are true, and both are incomplete,” says Alshaibi. Her lens layers the political, historical and the emotional, showcasing the tensions that remain as an aftermath of war.
Adding significant depth to her exploration, Alshaibi incorporates architectural archives, including those of the renowned Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji, alongside her father’s archive of photographs and her own meticulous fieldwork utilising LiDAR technology, a technology that allowed her to create precise mappings of Baghdad's urban fabric. “In many ways, the project is an act of triangulation between an architectural imaginary, a personal lineage, and a technological record. My father's photographs, and the way he taught me to see, lives alongside Chadirji’s ambitions for a modern Iraq, and the dispassionate mapping of LiDAR,” explains Alshaibi. The collages therefore come together in ways that are unexpected, giving them dimensions that may not be evident with just one look.
Through the layered narratives of طرس, Sama Alshaibi initiates a vital dialogue about the enduring impact of historical events on the urban landscape and the individual psyche. Her collages serve not as definitive statements but as explorations of Baghdad's ongoing transformation, inviting viewers to contemplate the intricate interplay between memory, architecture, and the relentless march of time. طرس (Tterss) is on show at Ayyam Gallery until 30 May.
