Phantom Home @ Jeu de Paume, Paris

The photographic work of Ahlam Shibli (Palestine, 1970) addresses the contradictory implications of the notion of home. The work deals with the loss of home and the fight against that loss, but also with restrictions and limitations that the idea of home imposes on the individuals and groups marked by repressive identity politics. Examples of places where the problematic is encountered include the occupied Palestinian areas; monuments that commemorate members of the French Resistance against the Nazis together with French fighters in the colonial wars against peoples who demanded their own independence; the bodies of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders from Eastern societies; and the communities of children in Polish orphanages.

Death, Ahlam Shibli’s latest photographic series especially conceived for this retrospective, shows the efforts of Palestinian society to preserve the presence of those who lost their lives fighting against the occupation of their homeland. Death contains a broad representation of the absent ones through photographs, posters, graves and graffiti displayed as a form of resistance against the colonial regime.

The exhibition includes six of the photographic series produced by Ahlam Shibli during the last decade. Most of the works are accompanied by captions assigning each photograph to a specific time and place in an investigative process that often implies long empirical and conversational contact with the subjects in question. Both text and photograph form a unit that protects them against use in any context other than the anti-colonial politics that motivates the author.

The exhibition opens this Tuesday and will be Jeu de Paume’s main summer proposal running through until September 1st. Mofe info this way.