Encounters

Sueraya Shaheen was born in Beirut and currently resides in New York City and Dubai. She studied Art and Design at Corcoran College in Washington, where she learned to use photography as an expressive medium. For two decades, she has worked in both photojournalism and digital artistic photography, a discipline that has led her to become one of the most recognized portraitists of recent times.

This exhibition is composed of fifteen portraits taken by Shaheen, in which the subjects are avant-garde and cosmopolitan artists from the Middle East. Her focus centered on imbuing the disturbing aspects of each of their worlds, incorporating symbols of war and destructive realities. The photographs open a door for us to understand the vocabulary of their regions, energies, concepts, traditions, and contexts. In these images, we find a forceful pairing with a political-poetic accent.

Among the artists portrayed by Shaheen, within the intimacy of their studios, are Hassan Hajjaj, El Seed, Hayv Kahraman, Bita Fayyazi, and Ayman Baalbaki. Her portraits lead the viewer to decipher symbols of a thousand-year-old tribal and Bedouin tradition that seeks to position itself on the global stage of contemporary art.

Shaheen has held solo exhibitions at the Barbara Davis Gallery in Houston, Texas; La Fontaine Centre of Contemporary Art in Manama, Bahrain; Govinda Gallery in Washington; the Kennedy Center; the Salsali Private Museum in Dubai; and at Sloan Fine Arts in New York City, among others.