Arab art all set to make an impression in Hawaii

Anna Seaman, the national news, October 27, 2014

As an Iraqi-Palestinian, displacement is something that Sama Alshaibi knows all about. Conflicts over land and oil in both motherlands forced her to live overseas. She settled in the USA and eventually became a naturalised US citizen. But as an artist, Alshaibi is firmly and foremost a global citizen and her art, although it addresses her own issues, is cleverly relevant to anyone who chooses to engage with it.

 

"We are all a bit nomadic," she says, during a long conversation about Silsila, a video photographic project she began in 2009. "Our world is globalised and people are always moving between communities. Although we are not like the desert Bedouins and we now have planes to jump between points, what I am interested in is what is between those points."