Ayyam Gallery is pleased to present ‘طرس’, a solo exhibition featuring Sama Alshaibi’s most recent body of work. The exhibition brings together mixed-media collages and video art that reimagine Baghdad’s transformation—its peaks, declines, and latent possibilities. Through Alshaibi’s work, Baghdad becomes a site of physical presence and alternative visions—one that is “always mediated, annotated and glimpsed through shifting thresholds.” — Sama Alshaibi
ama Alshaibi’s project focuses on the spatial, material, and technological fragments that narrate the story of a place and its people. After a 40-year separation, Alshaibi returns to her homeland on multiple trips between 2021 and 2023. Longing to reorient herself with a city she had once known more through imagination than lived experience, she does so through various layers of mediums and imagery to reconstruct an abstracted and interrupted history and reality. Working with the archives of several architects, including the renowned Iraqi Rifat Chadirji, ‘طرس’, also draws inspiration from Andreas Huyssen’s writings on ‘miniatures’ of urban reality, using them to frame Baghdad through Alshaibi’s lens.
The Arabic title ‘طرس’ evokes the idea of a palimpsest, a concept Alshaibi explores through collages—a medium that mirrors Baghdad’s that mirror Baghdad’s complex and fragmented urban narrative—layering political, historical, and perceptual imprints to capture its contradictions and progression. The superimposed strata of imagery within the collages immerse the city’s ruins and infrastructures into a deeper narrative of alienation. Alshaibi interweaves the weight of engraved historical memory with the city’s ongoing modernisation, emphasising the tensions and complexities that persist in the aftermath of war.
Using LiDAR technology to scan the urban landscape, Alshaibi built an extensive repository of factual measurements, mapping the city’s neighborhoods. Alshaibi’s laser-precise data mappings are interwoven with her photographs and archival materials—including vernacular imagery and architectural renderings—to craft compositions that explore the elasticity between imagining and depicting. The bricolage layers temporalities, technologies, and fragmentations, tracing the evolution of a city shaped by imperial interventions, shifting ambitions, and impossible desires.
Through this complex portrayal, Alshaibi constructs a speculative space for understanding historical Arab cities as microcosms of broader global crises, where past and present collide, and modernisation, conflict, exile and revival intertwine.
Press release from Shyam Gallery
Image: Sama Alshaibi. In the Sil. 2025. Mixed media collage. 57 x 76 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Shyam Gallery
