I AM THE TRAVELER AND ALSO THE ROAD

Past Exhibition

17 March - 5 August 2023

Saturday to Thursday:

10 AM-7 PM

Friday:

1.30 - 7 PM

This exhibition is a journey that interconnects the visions of eleven remarkable photographers working in the WANA region today. I Am The Traveler And Also The Road honours the photographic practices of Fatema Bint Ahmad Al-Doh, Hayat Al-Sharif, Shaima Al-Tamimi, Samar Sayed Baiomy, Salih Basheer, Mohammed Elshamy, Reem Falaknaz, Rula Halawani, Mona Hassan, Fethi Sahraoui, and Abdo Shanan.

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Samar Sayed Baiomy

Image: Samar Sayed Baiomy

In 2021 and 2022, each of the photographers participating in I Am The Traveler And Also The Road was a recipient of the Sheikh Saoud Al-Thani Project Award, which is an annual grant award created by Tasweer Photo Festival Qatar to enable the development or completion of photographic projects by photographers living in the WANA region. With a panel of photography experts jurying this grant programme, and in collaboration with the Saoud Bin Mohammed Al-Thani Foundation, Tasweer is already in its third year of annually supporting and celebrating local and regional photographers. Through this award, Tasweer manifests its core aim of participating meaningfully in the forward momentum of exceptional photographers who are creating articulate stories from the region.

I Am The Traveler And Also The Road is intentionally curated to bring together both fully-completed and work-in-progress projects that carry the energy that underlies the deepest and most enduring photographic accounts of human situations and encounters. The exhibition installation that speaks to active, individual and unfolding directions of photography that are being created by photographers here in Qatar and in the WANA region today. The photographic projects drawn together in this exhibition share the present-day urgency of traveling into collective and individual lived experiences, and of marking and mapping unique and extraordinary human stories.

*from A Rhyme For the Odes (Mu’allaqat) by Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

“ Fatema Bint Ahmad Al-Doh’s photographic essay invites us into the rituals and environments of the Kalashi community in Pakistan. Her photographs are compassionate and beautiful – mesmerizing and articulate – and quite incredible in the way that they draw us into close encounters with a secret place and ancient tribe. ”

– Charlotte Cotton, Tasweer’s Artistic Director

Fatema AM Al-Doh
Fatema AM Al-Doh

Qatari documentary photographer Fatema Bint Ahmad Al-Doh focuses upon vanishing cultures, remote tribes, minority and indigenous people. Her first photographic project was about a Rashidi tribe that migrated from the Arabian Peninsula to Sudan. She is currently working on a project about the Kalash people who are one of the smallest ethnic minorities of Pakistan and was awarded with the Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award grant in 2022 in support of her continued development of this project. Using embedded approaches of traveling and living with the people she studies and documents, her photographs tend to capture the environments in natural light, with constant human presence in the work. 

“ Hayat Al-Sharif’s images provide an intimate look into the life of people, especially women, in Yemen today. The country is facing what the UN has named, “the worst humanitarian crisis of our time”, and through her photographs, the stories and struggles of everyday life are brought to the fore, compelling the viewer to dig deeper to understand and react to the crisis. ”

– Kristine Khouri, researcher in Arab cultural history

Hayat Al-Sharif
Hayat Al-Sharif

Hayat Al-Sharif is a photojournalist who shares human-scaled stories of women’s lives in Yemen. Her Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award grant has supported her indomitable aim to globally share close encounters with Yemeni women and their struggle to survive and provide for their families in such extreme conditions of famine, war and a pandemic. As a result of the conflicts in Yemen, Al-Sharif and her journalist husband were regularly threatened and attacked, and they were forced to leave Yemen in December 2022.  Al-Sharif and her family are currently living in Stavanger in Norway, where she is the recipient of the thirteenth Stavanger Free City Artist Award.   

“ Shaima Al-Tamimi is a remarkable visual storyteller who brings us into close and deep proximity to her family’s migratory identity and ancestral memories. The profound significance of photographs as material holders of histories, heritages, relationships - both loving and painful - is the foundations from which she creatively works. Her articulate movement from photography and film, and investigations with mixed reality technology gives us multilayered experiences that reconstruct and animate cultural memory ”

– Charlotte Cotton, Tasweer’s Artistic Director

Shaima Al-Tamimi
Shaima Al-Tamimi

Through the mediums of photography, film, and writing, Shaima Al-Tamimi interweaves historical and family archives with her photographic portraits, and builds upon her deeply-rooted and highly-personal documentary approach in new and unexpected ways. In 2020, she was awarded a Photography and Social Justice Fellowship by the Magnum Foundation, where she developed her multimedia project and film Don’t Get Too Comfortable. In 2021, it was nominated for the Orrizonti Award for Best Short film at the 78th Venice International Film Festival (La Biennale) and was the first Yemeni film to have participated at Venice to date. Don’t Get Too Comfortable is an expansion of her long-term project As if we never came, which is on show at Mathaf’s project space in partnership with Tasweer, as a satellite to I Am The Traveler And Also The Road.

“ Samar Sayed Baiomy has created a captivating project. It is such a deep journey, with all the details of the place and people who have defined El Max in Alexandria. The sweet water from the Nile and the salt water from the Mediterranean meet at El Max. That intensity is brought to the surface in her photographic investigation of the demolished village, with only its memory remaining in the memories of its people. This is an important document that narrates the stories of this community. ”

– Khalifa Al Obaidly, Tasweer’s Managing Director

Samar Sayed Baiomy
Samar Sayed Baiomy

Born in 1990, Samar Sayed Baiomy is a visual artist living and working in Alexandria. 

Baiomy’s visual and research-based practice concentrates on documenting people's lives and self-identities, and the relationships between home, inhabitance, and memory. She was awarded a 2021 Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award grant for her Revive Memories project that stems from Baiomy’s PhD research into the destruction of the fishing village El Max in Alexandria.  Using photography, oral history, archival research and field notes, she pieces together a collective memory of a fast-disappearing time and place. 

“ I am incredibly moved by the depth and artistic ambition of Salih Basheer’s 22 Days In Between project that visually and conceptually calls forth, reconfigures and heals his personal trauma. His photographic project explores how loss and absence are defining forces in how we shape our sense of self and the narratives we create to comprehend our experiences in life. ”

– Charlotte Cotton, Tasweer’s Artistic Director

Salih Basheer
Salih Basheer

Salih Basheer originates from Omdurman in Sudan.  He has lived in Cairo since 2013 and received his Bachelor of Science degree in Geography from Cairo University. Basheer's passion for photography began when he moved to Cairo and has been integral in helping him rediscover himself and his heritage. He credits the medium of photography as giving him a visual language to fully express himself, alongside of the vital role in his journey as a photographer that living between Khartoum and Cairo has inspired. Basheer photographed the 2021 coup and revolution in Sudan for platforms including AP, Al Jazeera, and Sputnik, and received his Diploma in Photojournalism at DMJX [Danish school of media and journalism] in Copenhagen in the same year. 

“ Mohammed Elshamy is a photographer who bears witness to the historic movement of nations and their calls for change. He captures the moments he has lived through and experienced. From his point of view, the passion of the photographer and how he takes personal risks at the frontline are manifest. He is there, quietly, in the aftermath, portraying the dispersal of survivors, and the impact of the upheavals of our world. It is crucial that photographers show us what is happens in Arab countries and capture truth with an artist’s frame. ”

– Khalifa Al Obaidly, Tasweer’s Managing Director

Mohammed Elshamy
Mohammed Elshamy

Mohammed Elshamy was 17 years of age when he received the Egyptian Press Award in 2011, while he was an apprentice photojournalist at the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. In 2014, he was a recipient of the Magnum Foundation Human Rights Fellowship in New York. He has chronicled human crises in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and Nigeria and his photographs have been published by global media including The Guardian newspaper, Al Jazeera and Time magazine.  Elshamy’s extensive project - Egyptians Exiled - takes us into the violent heart of August 2013, and Egypt’s regime change, uprising and public massacre in Cairo of 800 people in the Rabaa and Nahda public squares. He brings us into quiet contemplation of the impact upon individuals and families who form a new wave of Egyptian Diaspora identity.   

“ Reem Falaknaz’s project beautifully sheds light on the private lives and rituals of individuals in the Gulf. Her sensitivity and commitment in exploring a new perspective in documenting the cultural practices and rituals. ”

– Kristine Khouri, researcher in Arab cultural history

Reem Falaknaz
Reem Falaknaz

Reem Falaknaz is a photographer whose work in the UAE and Oman documents social and physical landscapes. In 2014, she took part in the Magnum Foundation’s Arab Documentary Photography Program, supported by the Arab Fund for Art and Culture and the Prince Claus Fund. Falaknaz’s capacity to create evocative installations of her photographic work is manifest in her art commissions, including her contributions at the UAE's National Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale; the 2020 Lahore Biennale; and Expo 2020 in Florence, Italy. She was awarded a 2022 Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award grant and has created an installation for Tasweer of a project set in the Dhafur Governate in Southern Oman, bringing together of private and public emotions, values and ideas. 

“ Rula Halawani is an exceptional artist who has continually navigated and examined the consequences of occupation upon the cultural narratives and contested land of her native Palestine. I am incredibly excited to see how Rula Halawani will grow the second “chapter” of her ‘For you Mother’ body of work. This recently started project summons Halawani’s personal history and the meaning of wildflowers in Palestine. Beauty and resilience - disappearance and regrowth - are undoubtedly the narrative ‘seeds’ that Rula Halawani is nurturing. ”

– Charlotte Cotton, Tasweer’s Artistic Director

Rula Halawani
Rula Halawani

Artist Rula Halawani focuses on the impact of occupation on space and nature - tracing the lives and histories that can still be found in often overlooked details, whether in the material culture of Palestinian society or the transformed landscapes of her childhood. Halawani lives in her home city of East Jerusalem and has exhibited extensively and internationally. In I Am The Traveler And Also The Road, Halawani presents hand-printed photographs from her new series For You Mother 2. This powerful series of landscape photographs are made with discontinued film stock, and is dedicated to her mother and Halawani’s childhood memories of wildflowers in Palestine and the disappearing Palestinian landscape, now replaced by Israeli settlements. Utilizing traditional photographic means, Halawani calls forth the pre-1948 history of Palestinian culture and landscapes.

“ We follow Mona Hassan, as she follows her subjects. We discover as she does - nomadic tribes and a simpler lifestyle that we could ever imagine. She will show us images that are taken in harsh circumstances of a harsh reality. Let’s see where she will take us next and teach us more. ”

– Sueraya Shaheen, photographer and Photo Editor, Tribe magazine

Mona Hassan
Mona Hassan

Mona Hassan is a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Alexandria University, Egypt. She has been a practicing photographer of impressive energy, focus and critical acclaim since 2016.  She is well known for her photographs of the limestone quarry workers in the Manya Governorate of Upper Egypt, demonstrating her capacity to create unforgettable images of remote and underrepresented human life. Hassan has used her 2021 Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award to create a vital record of her travels through the governorates of Egypt over the past 2 years with a nomadic Arab tribe in search of pasture for their livestock. Through her photographs and extensive field notes, Hassan takes us on a remarkable journey into ways of life and human stories that we can only encounter through her close vantage point. 

“ Fethi Sahraoui is a visual poet and a unique storyteller. The Wind that Shakes Dreams is an extraordinary evocation of an almost dream-like place and situation through which Fethi guides us, where its inhabitants patiently wait while we pass by. I’m reminded of the American writer Truman Capote’s quest for achieving what he called a “non-fiction novel” – the evocative holding of objectively observed and subjectively felt realities within one creative form. ”

– Charlotte Cotton, Tasweer’s Artistic Director

Fathi Sahrawi
Fathi Sahrawi

Born in 1993, in the town of Hassi R'Mel in Southern Algeria, Fethi Sahraoui creates photographic narratives that centre on social landscapes. After studying foreign languages at university in Mascara, he graduated in 2018, with his final research project focused on then contribution made by Black American photographers during The Civil Rights Movement from the mid. 1950s and through the 1960s. Sahraoui’s work has been shown in cultural institutions including The Arab World Institute in Paris, and his photographs have been published on numerous platforms, including The New York Times, among others. He is a member of the 220Collective, a Magnum Foundation Fellow, and a participant in The Joop Swart Masterclass by World Press Photo. 

“ The work of Abdo Shanan is a deeply intimate approach to visualizing the melding of social and individual identity within the context of public protests. A Little Louder captures the 'Hirak' demonstrations which started in February 2019 in Algeria. I am struck by how personal the images feel and interested to see how Abdo extends this project in the time after Covid-19 lockdowns and asks how a society in protest is changed and continues to resist. ”

– Sheikha Maryam Hassan Mohamed A Al-Thani, Tasweer’s Senior Curator

Abdo Shanan
Abdo Shanan

Abdo Shanan was born in 1982 in Oran, Algeria to a Sudanese father and an Algerian mother. He studied Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Sirte in Libya and subsequently undertook an internship at the Magnum photography agency in Paris. In 2015, he co-founded the 220Collective – a peer-led organization for Algerian photographers. He won The CAP Prize (Contemporary African Photography) in 2019 for his project entitled Dry and, in the same year, he was selected for The Joop Swart Masterclass by World Press Photo. In 2020, he was the recipient of Premi Mediterrani Albert Camus Incipiens and co-curated an exhibition, Narratives from Algeria at Photoforum Pasquar in Switzerland. Shanan was a recipient of the Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project award in 2022 for the further development of his A Little Louder project and publication, which intensely maps the experiences of Algerians who participated in the ‘Hirak’ protests since February 2019.