MANAL ABU-SHAHEEN

Artist Statement
My recent work focuses on the ways in which globalized communication brings idealized images from one culture in contact with the realities of another. Motivated by a lack of visual history of the landscape in Lebanon, I am building my own photographic archive of what Beirut looks like today: a city dominated by billboards. In one sense the advertisements serve as a visualized end energizing capitalist growth, and in another they purport a mythologized western ideal that is incongruous in the post-conflict city. The advertisements and pervasive neo-liberal capital represent our most recent form of colonialism. What is new and fascinating to me about this system is that it employs images as its most powerful tool. This under-documented place is now occupied by images of a different place and people.

www.manalabushaheen.com

CV