Artist’s Note: Where Do I Go?
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Lebanese Civil War, Lebanon still suffers its consequences. After years of brutal Civil War, corrupt governments, months of Covid-19 lockdown; the 2020 Port of Beirut explosions further plunged Lebanon into the abyss and total economic meltdown, with shortages of cash, gas, electricity, medicine, and water.
However, I found hope and inspiration in the young generation of women who were volunteering in the reconstruction after the explosions and I chose to focus on their majestic presence, creativity, strength, dignity, and resilience to collaborate with them and tell their story– our collective story– the story of modern Lebanon through the eyes of a woman and about women growing up in the fraught conditions that are part of the collective experience of the past 50 years.
Every picture has a narrative. The women, the land, the architecture are intertwined.
I see my younger self in these women. I feel their hopes, pains, dreams, fears, dilemmas. I was their age when I left Lebanon, many are now at that same juncture, in 1984 during the Civil War in what had been the largest wave of emigration, until now.
(Click the photos to enlarge)
Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography. Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide in solo and group exhibtions, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Fotografiska, Institut du Monde Arabe, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums, institutions, and private collections. A mid-career retrospective of her work was recently on view at Cleveland Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the American University of Beirut Museum.
In 2023, she will have 2 solo museum exhibitions of her recently published series SHE at the Huntsville Museum of Art and the Fitchburg Museum of Art. Her images will also be part of a traveling exhibition about Women Artists from the Middle East that opens at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).
Matar received several awards and nominations including: a 2022 Leica Women Foto Project Award, 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artistin- residency grant, 2021 (and 2011, 2007) Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowships, and a 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Arnold New Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture, the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition with an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and for the Taylor Wessing Prize with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the ICA/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition.
She published four books: SHE, 2021; L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009.
