This is Rania Matar‘s new book. Its title: She. It is published by Radius Books and it gives rise to several exhibitions, the first being at the Obscura Gallery in Santa Fe.
As a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, Rania Matar’s cross-cultural experiences inform her art. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood—both in the United States where she lives, and in the Middle East where she is from. Rania Matar: SHE focuses on young women in their late teens and early twenties, who are leaving the cocoon of home, entering adulthood and facing a new reality. Depicting women in the United States and the Middle East, this project highlights how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines. Each young woman becomes an active participant in the image-making process, presiding over the environment and making it her own, climbing on rocks and trees, jumping fully dressed in muddy water and waterfalls, crawling under thorns, or trespassing into abandoned buildings, each of them embracing the artistic process and collaboration. As a result Matar found herself focusing on their strength and their majestic presence, and portraying the raw beauty of those women—their age, individuality, physicality and mystery—and photographing them the way she, a woman and a mother, sees them: beautiful, creative, alive.
Rania Matar : She
Photography by Rania Matar
Published by Radius Books
Texts by Mark Alice Durant and Orin Zahra
Hardcover / 11.5 x 13.5 inches
83 images / 184 pages
ISBN: 9781942185833
https://www.radiusbooks.org/all-books/p/rania-matar-she
Obscura Gallery
1405 Paseo de Peralta
Santa Fe, NM 87501
Exhibition on view through October 31, 2021
https://www.obscuragallery.net/exhibitions/
