The Amelie A. Wallace Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of "Our Land," a new exhibition comprising photography and video by artists from the Middle East, North Africa, and their diaspora. Curated by Anthony Hamboussi, photographer and adjunct professor in the Visual Arts Department at SUNY Old Westbury, the exhibition explores intersections of land, power, and politics to question dominant historical narratives and current Western perceptions of the MENA region. Interested in modes of self-representation, "Our Land" presents the work of Arab artists based in or having ancestral ties to the region, to consider landscapes of colonization and postcolonial reconstruction, indigenous land rights, ecological injustice, and war.
The exhibition will be available from February 4 through March 13, 2019. For full hours and contact information for the exhibition, visit the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery website.
- A public reception and opening event will be held on Wednesday, February 13, 2019 from 4-7 p.m.
- There will be an "Artist Talk" featuring Manal Abu-Shaheen and Aisha Mershani, moderated by Rania Lee Khalil on Wednesday, February 20, 2019 at 4 p.m.
Interrogating the darker histories of landscape photography and “development” in non-Western countries, "Our Land" questions the neutrality of scholarly and scientific landscape image production, and the roles of said images and development in imperialism and domination of the region. The works in "Our Land" were selected for the ways in which they challenge simplistic representations of cultural identity. In turn, the exhibition compels us to reconsider our relationship to the land and its exploitation under advanced capitalism and environmental crisis.
Participating Artists include: Manal Abu-Shaheen, Moath Alofi, Youssef Chahine, Fouad ElKoury, Rana ElNemr, Anthony Hamboussi, Rhea Karam, Rania Lee Khalil, Yazan Khalili, Aisha Mershani, Camille Zakharia.
