Until May 20, 2023, Mathaf (Arab Museum of Modern Art) is hosting a group photo show titled I Am The Traveler And Also The Road. It features the following photographers from the Western Asia and North Africa (WANA) region: Fatema Bint Ahmad Al-Doh, Hayat Al-Sharif, Shaima Al-Tamimi, Samar Sayed Baiomy, Salih Basheer, Mohammed Elshamy, Reem Falaknaz, Rula Halawani, Mona Hassan, Mouneb Nassar, Fethi Sahraoui, and Abdo Shanan. All of them received the Sheikh Saoud Al-Thani Project Award, a grant given to photographers from the WANA region every year. It enables them to continue working on or complete their projects.
The I Am The Traveler And Also The Road exhibition showcases projects (both completed ones and those which are in progress) that reflect the deepest and most enduring photo accounts of human situations and encounters. They share the current urgency of travelling into collective and individual lived experiences and of marking unique human stories.
About the artists
Fatema AM Al-Doh is a documentary photographer from Qatar. Her work is focused on disappearing cultures, remote tribes, minority and indigenous people. Her сurrent project is about the Kalasha, Pakistan’s smallest ethnic group. She received the Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award in 2022 in support of this project.
Hayat Al-Sharif is a photographer and photojournalist from Yemen now living in Stavanger, Norway, who documents stories of women’s lives in Yemen. The Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award she was given has supported her aim to show the world how Yemeni women struggle to survive and feed their families during famine, war, and a pandemic.
Shaima Al-Tamimi is a Yemeni-East African visual artist who resides in Qatar; her art practice involves photography, film, and writing. Being inspired by her and her family’s story, in her work she explores such themes as migration, intergenerational trauma, healing, and identity. In 2020, Al-Tamimi received a Photography and Social Justice Fellowship by the Magnum Foundation, where she shot her award winning film Don’t Get Too Comfortable: a letter to her deceased grandfather, in which she questions the continuous pattern of movement amongst Yemenis in diaspora. It is an expansion of her long-term project As if we never came. Al-Tamimi was given The Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award grant in 2021.
Samar Sayed Baiomy (b. 1990) is a visual artist residing in Alexandria; she documents people’s lives and self-identities and the connections between home, inhabitance, and memory. In 2021, she received a Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award for her project Revive Memories. It is based on her PhD research into the destruction of El Max, a fishing village in Alexandria.
Salih Basheer (b. 1995, Omdurman, Sudan) is a freelance photographer who concentrates on social issues. While studying Geography at Cairo University, Egypt, he started as a self-taught photographer and later studied Photojournalism in Denmark. Salih covered the revolutions in Sudan and the protests after the sit-in breakup in Khartoum.
Mohammed Elshamy (b. 1994) is an Egyptian photojournalist who lives and works between Lagos and New York and who has documented human crises in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, and Nigeria. When he was 17, in 2011, he got the Egyptian Press Award and the Magnum Foundation Human Rights Fellowship in New York in 2014. Elshamy’s project, Egyptians Exiled, is dedicated to Egypt’s regime change and the protests in 2013. It makes one contemplate the impact upon those forming a new wave of Egyptian Diaspora identity.
Reem Falaknaz (b. 1985) is a photographer and filmmaker who lives and works between Oman and the UAE. Falaknaz travels throughout the Emirates to collect and document the narratives of its inhabitants. In her work she explores the UAE’s cultural composition and the nature of its residents.
Rula Halawani (b. 1964, East Jerusalem) is a Palestinian photographer, artist, and educator based in Jerusalem. She captures the impact of occupation on space and nature. Her photographs depict the changes taking place daily in the Palestinian territory. Halawani was granted a residency fellowship at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, in 2016 and the Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award in 2021.
Mona Hassan, an Egyptian photographer, is known for her photos of the limestone quarry workers in the Manya Governorate, Upper Egypt. She has used her 2021 Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award to document her travels through Egypt over the past 2 years with a nomadic Arab tribe.
Mouneb Nassar (b. 2001) is a Syrian photojournalist whose work is focused on social issues. As a photographer and reporter, he covered life under siege in Douma, Eastern Ghouta, Idlib, and Aleppo’s countryside from 2013 until 2021. Nassar won multiple international awards for documenting and challenges of living in Syria and the horrors of war,
Fethi Sahraoui (b. 1993, Hassi R’Mel, Southern Algeria) is a photographer who takes pictures of rural communities in Algeria. In particular, he documents everyday life in the Saharawi refugee camps on the country’s south-western border. Sahraoui is a member of the 220Collective, a Magnum Foundation Fellow, and a participant in The Joop Swart Masterclass by World Press Photo.
Abdo Shanan (b. 1982, Oran, Algeria) studied Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Sirte, Libya, which was followed by an internship at the Magnum photography agency, Paris. In 2015, Shanan co-founded the 220Collective, an organisation for Algerian photographers. In 2019, he won The Contemporary African Photography Prize for his project Dry in which the theme of national identity is explored. In the same year, Shanan was selected for The Joop Swart Masterclass by World Press Photo. In 2020, he became the recipient of Premi Mediterrani Albert Camus Incipiens.
To learn more about I Am The Traveler And Also The Road, please visit the show’s official web page.
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