Ahlam Shibli

[1][2][3][4] Her work explores themes of home and belonging and documents the life of Arabs in villages unrecognized by Israel in the Negev and northern Galilee regions.

Shibli's views of landscapes, towns, precarious settlements, interiors, and exteriors, as well as cemeteries, exhibit an accumulation of signs that reveal the effects of the Israeli rule over the land.

Starting with commemorations of the atrocious massacre at Tulle that took place on 9 July 1944, Shibli reflects on the paradox of a population that resisted the German occupation, only to embark a few years later on a colonial war in Indochina and Algeria.

The house starves when you are away (2008), or Eastern LGBT (2006), in which Shibli documents the lives of transsexual communities, extend her modus operandi beyond the Palestinian issue.

[17][18] The numerous representations of martyrs are the visual motif that allows Shibli to reveal how the Palestinian community structures the public and domestic sphere around these absent figures and their death.

Often reduced to iconic reproductions that flatten bodies and faces in the name of national identity politics, the compulsive proliferation of memorials bears testimony to the phantomatic nature of home.