When I first met Sama Alshaibi in 2001, she wasn't the internationally recognised artist that she is today. She had just moved to Denver, Colorado with her poet-husband and young son, and was working as a commercial photographer to make ends meet while her husband attended the same doctoral programme in English in which I was enrolled. She was debating whether she was "good enough" to apply to the Master of Fine Arts programme at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
The past eleven years of her career as an artist has been a testament to why she is exceptional in terms of her aesthetic vision, technical ability, ambition and drive, and political commitment. Alshaibi's prolifically exhibited visual artwork speaks to the difficulties of living with a complex identity in a world that privileges borders, containment, and restrictions on mobility - one that denotes otherness and multiplicity as threat. Her photography, short videos, and multimedia installations also remind us about historical bonds that flouted conventional boundaries; in her later work, we see intimations of worlds established not by rulers and the networks of power they sought to establish, but by waves of longing, desire, adventure, curiosity, need, and hope. We remember that we share a deeper topography of memory, tying us to a history far longer than that of our recent migrations, displacements, and limitations dictated by fear.
