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)
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
