2025 marks fifty years since the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. Half a century later, Lebanon still suffers its consequences. In recent years, conditions have deteriorated quickly, especially after a total economic meltdown, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Beirut Port Explosion on August 4, 2020, and yet other wars in 2024 and 2026.
Through it all, I found hope and inspiration in the young generation of women. I chose to focus on their majestic presence, creativity, strength, dignity, and resilience. I saw my younger self in them. I was twenty when I left Lebanon in 1984 during the civil war, to go study in the United States, in what had been the largest wave of emigration—until recently. Many find themselves at that same juncture as they face the painful decision in determining whether to stay or leave: one road leading to separation from family, home, and life as they know it, the other staying despite the fraught conditions in the country, holding on to hope for better days.
On the crumbling wall of an abandoned building, I saw graffiti scrawled in Arabic: لوين روح (Where do I go?). I was with Perla, a young woman who suddenly threw herself against that wall. In that fleeting moment, that question became the title of this body of work.
While this project started in 2020 after the Beirut Port Explosions, it kept evolving as I connected with more women and as the situation on the ground kept deteriorating. Together, we collaborated to visually tell personal stories – theirs, but also our collective story—against the meaningful and symbolic backdrops of the unique fabric of the country: textured walls of Beirut, the Mediterranean, raw mountains, traditional and abandoned buildings, and the many layers of destruction accumulated over the years. Every picture has a narrative. Women, land, and architecture are all intertwined. The process is collaborative and the photo session always evolves organically as the women become active participants in the image-making process, presiding over the environment, and making it their own. The need to hold on to creativity and self-expression feels urgent.
While my photographs may not provide solutions or closure, I hope they nevertheless invite the viewer to pause and find the beauty, hope, shared humanity, and grace that still exist despite everything. They are my love letters to the women of Lebanon.
Where Do I Go? was published as a book in March 2026 with an exhibition at the Eskenazi Museum. The first edition sold out, and the second edition will be available this fall.
Born and raised in Lebanon, Matar moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-Palestinian-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 shows, including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, LACMA, Carnegie Museum of Art, ICA/Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Fotografiska, Institut du Monde Arabe, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums.
A mid-career retrospective of her work was on view at Cleveland Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and American University of Beirut Museum. Additional solo museum exhibitions include Middlebury Museum of Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, Rollins Museum of Art, and The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum at Indiana University.
Matar has received several awards, including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2021 (also 2011, 2007) Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants, 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award, 2008 ICA/Boston Foster Prize. She was a finalist for the Oskar Barnack Award 2023, Arnold Newman Prize 2022, and Outwin Portrait Competition 2022 with an exhibition at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC.
She curated “Louder Than Hearts”, a group exhibition of women from the Arab World and Iran, Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. 2025
Matar has published five books: Where Do I Go? 2026; SHE, 2021; L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009
