Rania Matar: SHE
The photographs of Lebanese Palestinian American artist Rania Matar tell the stories of young women through portraits taken throughout Lebanon, France, Egypt, and the United States.
Photographed through car windows, in abandoned buildings, snow-strewn fields, or floating in the Mediterranean Sea, the women collaborate with Matar, sharing a sense of creative agency. These large-scale color photographs portray individuality intimately tied to the histories and connections of place.
On the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), the photographs taken in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, Southern Lebanon, and in and around the Palestinian refugee camps showcase the beauty of resilience found among the traces of destruction.
Rania Matar: She
Rania Matar’s captivating photographs of young women around the world capture the transitory beauty of adolescence.
– Katie White, Artnet
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. Matar portrays the raw beauty of her subjects—their age, individuality, physicality and mystery—and photographs them the way she, a woman and a mother, sees them: beautiful, alive.