Exhibited for the first time as a whole, SHE features 50 large-scale color images of young women in their 20s—the ages of Rania Matar’s own daughters—leaving the cocoon of home and transitioning into womanhood. In earlier projects, Matar photographed young women in relation to the controlled environment of their bedrooms. Here, she captures them in the larger arena they find themselves in after leaving home—the global and complicated backdrop that now constitutes their lives in transition.
Rania Matar has dedicated her photographic practice to exploring deeply personal narratives, drawing upon her multifaceted cultural background and cross-cultural experiences as a Lebanese-born American artist and mother. Her work explores issues of individual and collective identity, often through photographs of women in the United States and the Middle East. Working in collaboration with her subjects to create intimate portraits, her work focuses on our shared humanity and emphasizes underlying similarities rather than apparent differences.
Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. during the Lebanese Civil War. As a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography. Matar was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and a Leica Women Foto Award in 2022, and is shortlisted for the Oskar Barnack Award. Her work has been widely published and exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of museums and private collections worldwide. She has published four books: SHE, L’Enfant-Femme, A Girl and Her Room, and Ordinary Lives.
Rania Matar: SHE
August 19 – November 26, 2023
Huntsville Museum of Art
Adtran, Jurenko, Thurber & Guild Galleries
https://hsvmuseum.org/rania-matar-she/
Exhibition organized by The Museum Box LLC, Boston, MA
