Documenting Conflict: Bodies, Landscapes, and the Histories They Carry | Sama Alsaibi
This interview is part of Documenting Conflict, a series that explores the ways in which conflict is documented and how who gets to document it shapes how we remember, interpret, and understand it. Documentation extends beyond journalists and historians, spilling into studios, workshops, galleries, and public spaces.
This series of interviews with artists will provide a critique on how truth is constructed and what it means to witness in an era of mass media. Trace how creativity and care intersect with the recording of conflict, turning trauma and societal fracture into forms of reflection and dialogue.
Rethinking how conflict is documented means placing empathy and witness at the centre. It is about uncovering what is often silenced and shaping memory in ways that go beyond mere collection, inviting dialogue, reflection, and understanding.
I am Palestinian and Iraqi, and political forces determined my distance from both places. Whether I could grow up there, return, or belong was never only a personal question. So I do not really experience the local and the global as separate scales that have to be connected afterward.
Sama Alsaibi
Artist
Sama Alshaibi is a U.S.-based Iraqi-Palestinian artist whose practice explores the politics of observation, memory, landscape, and belonging and challenges how these are documented. Through photography, performance, and moving images, she examines how histories of exile, conflict, and survival are carried within bodies and landscapes, while questioning how what we see is shaped. Her work, which has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Biennale, invites us to think critically about representation, place, and the lasting afterlives of history. Sama is the Regents Professor of Art at the University of Arizona.
Anna Borrie: In See Without Being Seen, you reverse the relationship between observer and observed by having the subject look back at the camera. How does returning the gaze challenge modes of representation?
Sama Alsaibi: The subject looking back does not suddenly equalise the power of the camera. I don’t think representation can be solved that easily. What it does is interrupt the assumption that the person being photographed is available to us. The camera has a long history of producing that kind of authority, especially in Orientalist, documentary, military, and media representations of Iraq and the Arab world. The person being looked at becomes something to interpret, categorise, fear, desire, or possess.
That question was already embedded in the archival footage I appropriated from British Pathé. I was drawn specifically to moments when people looked directly into the camera. Sometimes they seem curious or perplexed. At other moments, you can see irritation, or the instant when someone registers that they are being filmed. Those looks became very important to me because they expose the encounter that documentary images usually ask us to forget. There is a camera there. There is someone behind it. And the person in front of it has understood, however briefly, that something of them is being taken. I began studying those moments of recognition, particularly because these were not consenting subjects in any meaningful sense. Their gaze back at the camera becomes a small but very legible interruption of the image-maker’s authority.
My own performance shifts that relationship again because I am very consciously performing for the camera. I stare directly into it, and there is a sustained confrontation in that exchange. Eventually, I make the decision to look away and enter the bodily performance. Looking back can challenge the camera, but it does not free the subject from its structure. My decision to look away marks a shift in the terms of that relationship. I am now accepting the gaze of the camera and the audience, giving them permission to watch and study my movements. The performance becomes something I am choosing to make available to them.
The work then moves toward technologies of remote vision and warfare, where even that possibility of reciprocity begins to disappear. A drone can see a body from above while remaining completely outside that person’s field of vision. For me, that progression is central. The question shifts from who is looking and who is being looked at to who has the power to see without being seen, and what happens when the person being watched can no longer return the gaze at all.
Anna: LiDAR mapping is combined with archival fragments and personal memory in Tterss (Palimpsest), which constructs Baghdad as both a measurable and imagined space. How does this hybrid method challenge conventional ways of documenting cities shaped by conflict and displacement?
Sama: I’m suspicious of the idea that a city can be documented into coherence. LiDAR interested me because it appears to offer something extraordinarily precise. It measures space point by point. But when you actually work with it, it is full of gaps, occlusions, broken surfaces, and things it cannot see. That failure became as important to me as its accuracy.
I returned to Iraq after forty years away. Baghdad had existed for me through family memory and photographs, through architecture and news images, and through what I had imagined across that distance. Returning did not resolve those versions of the city. It made me more aware of how many Baghdads were operating at once.
So I began bringing my own photographs and LiDAR scans into conversation with family and vernacular imagery and architectural archives connected to Rifat Chadirji. I don’t give one form of evidence authority over another. Personal memory is obviously subjective, but an archive is not neutral either. Neither is a map. Neither is a photograph.
I think of Baghdad as a palimpsest because one history has never cleanly replaced another. The ambitions of modern Iraq remain layered with the ruptures that followed and with the family and ordinary life that persisted through them. The hybrid form lets me stay inside that instability rather than produce a seamless picture of the city.
Anna: Across your practice, how do you navigate the relationship between representation, power, and the histories embedded in images?
Sama: Across my practice, I think about representation less as a question of accuracy than of authority. Images do not just show us something. Over time, they establish what we expect to see, and some ways of seeing become so familiar that they begin to feel natural or truthful.
I have spent much of my life aware of the distance between lived experience and the images through which places I know intimately become understood from the outside. But I do not believe my own images somehow sit outside that problem. Making a new image does not necessarily correct an old one. I want the work to interrupt the confidence with which an image can claim to explain a body, a place, or a history.
Power operates through what an image shows, but also through the circumstances that made that image possible and the systems that give one way of seeing more authority than another. I want the work to keep that authority from closing down what an image can mean. Images carry the histories of how they were made and used, but those histories do not fix their meaning forever.
Anna: What is the central thread that has remained consistent in your exploration of image making?
Sama: I keep returning to the relationship between the body and place. I think that has been there from the beginning, even before I had language for it. My body has appeared in a lot of the work, but I have never really thought of those images as self-portraiture. The body is more of a surrogate figure. It moves through landscapes shaped by borders, aridity, water, and the aftermath of conflict, and becomes a way of registering what has happened there.
I also respond very directly to the life I am living when I make the work. My first major project, Birthright, began while I was in graduate school and in the third trimester of pregnancy with my second child. It was also the first time I was able to go to Palestine, after finally receiving a U.S. passport. So questions of exile and return entered the work at the same moment I was thinking intensely about the pregnant body as a site of transformation, maternal protection, and extraordinary physical force. I understood that body not just as an image of femininity or identity, but as a container of life and as a powerful bodily presence moving through a landscape to which I had been denied access.
Over time, I think I have come to understand this as a kind of diasporic embodiment through landscape. For me, the body carries identity while becoming a measure of terrain, exile, drought, political violence, and survival. Through it, I can ask what larger histories and environmental forces do to us physically, and how they shape our sense of where and how we belong.
I am rarely representing war or displacement directly. What matters more to me is what those experiences leave behind and how they determine our relationship to a place. How do you carry a place after you have been separated from it? Trying to find a visual language for exile has stayed with me for a very long time. That is probably why I keep coming back to the idea of aftermath.
And now, twenty-one years after Birthright, I find myself returning to some of those questions through the same child I was carrying then. This year, I began a new project with my son in the Mesopotamian Marshes in Iraq. It is, in part, a mother and son story, but it is also embedded in the environmental catastrophes of the marshes and in the much longer visual, literary, and historical imagination of Mesopotamia, including The Epic of Gilgamesh. I find it remarkable that the work has come back around in this way. The life I am living changes, the places change, and the forms of the work change, but I am still thinking about how bodies and places carry history, and how we continue to live inside what those histories leave behind.
I am rarely representing war or displacement directly. What matters more to me is what those experiences leave behind and how they determine our relationship to a place. How do you carry a place after you have been separated from it?
Sama Alsaibi
Artist
Anna: In landscapes shaped by conflict, where the land is both witness and a casualty, how does your work challenge narratives that separate people from place and experience?
Sama: I do not really think of land as a passive witness. I am more concerned with how landscapes are made available to violence, and with how art participates in the ways we learn to see them.
Traci Brynne Voyles has been important to me here. In Wastelanding, she examines how landscapes and the people who inhabit them are made marginal, worthless, and “pollutable.” Sari Hanafi’s idea of “spacio-cide” extends that question into Palestine by describing violence enacted through the destruction of the space people need in order to remain. These concepts help me think about landscape not as background, but as something actively produced through power. A place can be made to appear empty before it is emptied.
That is how I think about Gaza. The destruction of land is inseparable from the destruction of the material basis of life. Destroying the possibility of remaining is also a way of acting directly on the people whose lives are bound to that place. The violence is spatial, ecological, and human at once.
Macarena Gómez-Barris calls this an “extractive view,” which sees “territories as commodities, rendering land as for the taking.” Extraction is a material operation, but it is also a way of seeing. Land becomes legible through what can be taken from it or projected onto it, while the living relationships already there are devalued. Land can be intensely desired while the living world that gives it meaning is treated as disposable.
There is something almost parasitic in that logic, as though the living systems and communities that sustain a place can be exhausted and value can simply move on to another host.
Rob Nixon’s idea of “slow violence” helps me think about how destruction continues beyond the moment we recognise as catastrophe. He describes a “delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space.” Ecological violence continues to act through damaged environments and through the bodies that have to live with their consequences. This is what I mean by aftermath. Catastrophe does not end when the spectacular event ends. It continues to narrow what forms of life remain possible.
Then there is the problem of my own medium. Landscape art has long participated in making land beautiful, sublime, empty, or available. Susan Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others that “the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.” I know exactly what she means. What is in front of the camera may be devastated or contaminated, marked by death, and still become formally beautiful as an image.
There is a long tradition in photography of using beauty to draw attention to environmental and political destruction, and I understand that impulse because I work within it. But beauty can also become an ethical alibi. A beautiful image of devastation can circulate through exhibitions and collections while giving us the feeling that looking itself constitutes engagement. But has it? Representation alone does not constitute critique. Sometimes beauty may make destruction easier to live with.
Jennifer Peeples names this contradiction through the “toxic sublime.” The question for me is not whether beauty is good or bad, but what it does. Beauty arrests attention, but that arrest is unstable. It can hold us in front of something we might otherwise avoid, or it can aestheticise the damage enough to make it easier to consume. Does the image disturb our relationship to that violence, or allow us to feel that looking was enough?
That is where my own work becomes part of the problem. Much of it has been made in landscapes shaped by displacement, environmental damage, political violence, and exile, while I am also constructing those landscapes as images. I care deeply about beauty and form, but I resist using them to resolve what is difficult about the subject. I build images and performances that hold the viewer inside those contradictions, asking them to question what is being made visible, what remains obscured, and what their own looking asks of the image. For me, the work is not there to illustrate suffering or provide an answer. It is there to make those relationships harder to separate.
Anna: Do you think the ecological landscape, such as land, climate, resources, or extraction, shapes the conflicts you are responding to, and in what ways?
Sama: Absolutely, but I would go further than saying ecology shapes conflict. Ecology itself can become a means through which political power is exercised.
The Mesopotamian Marshes made that very clear to me. Their near-destruction under Saddam Hussein was not an unfortunate environmental consequence of political violence. Altering the water itself was part of the violence, a way of attacking the Marsh Arabs through the ecosystem that sustained their lives. Today the pressures are different, but water is again determining what forms of life can continue there. Drought and extreme heat converge with upstream dams, pollution, and decisions over how water is distributed.
Water is not scenery or just a resource. Control over it is a form of governance. Its presence or absence can determine whether a community can remain in place.
There is a long tradition in photography of using beauty to draw attention to environmental and political destruction, and I understand that impulse because I work within it. But beauty can also become an ethical alibi. A beautiful image of devastation can circulate through exhibitions and collections while giving us the feeling that looking itself constitutes engagement. But has it? Representation alone does not constitute critique. Sometimes beauty may make destruction easier to live with.
Sama Alsaibi
Artist
Anna: There is a tension in telling a local story within global systems, such as capitalism, colonialism, or climate collapse. What led you to explore this space and tension within your work?
Sama: Exile made that tension unavoidable for me. I am Palestinian and Iraqi, and political forces determined my distance from both places. Whether I could grow up there, return, or belong was never only a personal question. So I do not really experience the local and the global as separate scales that have to be connected afterward.
At the same time, I am wary of what happens when large systems become the explanation for everything. Iraq can become a symbol of war. Palestine can become a symbol of displacement. Once a place is made to stand for an idea, much of what makes it particular disappears. The particular is how I resist that abstraction. I tend to begin with something close enough that I have to remain accountable to it.
But I also think through connection. I am constantly moving between intimate experience and the larger forces shaping it. I am rarely comfortable believing that I have arrived at a final explanation. Something happening at the political or environmental scale eventually enters the intimate one, sometimes materially and sometimes through the imagination.
Maybe that comes from living for a long time in the margins between places and having to explain one world to another. It probably also produces a certain hypervigilance. But I have never had the luxury of believing that the so-called ‘big picture’ is happening somewhere else. In my experience, those forces always find their way into ordinary life. That movement between scales is where a lot of the work begins.
Anna: What do you think is the role and responsibility of an artist when working with conflict and displacement?
Sama: I don’t think artists acquire special moral authority because we work with conflict. If anything, conflict should make us more suspicious of authority, including our own.
My own history gives me proximity to certain places and experiences, but proximity is not the same thing as permission or ownership. Not every image that can be made should be made. Sometimes responsibility is in what you refuse to photograph, what you refuse to turn into material, or what you recognise is not yours to tell.
I also resist the expectation that an artist connected to conflict has to become a spokesperson for it. That can flatten both the artist and the people being represented. A person living through war or displacement is still living a life. They should not become evidence of suffering simply because suffering is what an outside audience recognises most easily.
For me, art can do something more difficult than provide testimony or an answer. It can make an inherited narrative harder to repeat. I want the work to interrupt the expected account and leave enough unresolved that the viewer has to contend with what they thought they already understood. That is where I locate responsibility: not in claiming to speak for a history, but in resisting the certainty that allows one version of it to become fixed.
I am wary of what happens when large systems become the explanation for everything. Iraq can become a symbol of war. Palestine can become a symbol of displacement. Once a place is made to stand for an idea, much of what makes it particular disappears. The particular is how I resist that abstraction. I tend to begin with something close enough that I have to remain accountable to it.
Sama Alsaibi
Artist
Interview and Introduction by Anna Borrie
Anna Borrie is Associate Editor at Planted Journal, where she explores the intersections between ecology, art, and storytelling. Her work is rooted in a creating meaningful connections between people and their environments. She runs a community garden in Madrid, where she cultivates both plants and relationships with fellow gardeners. Her interests lie in creating collaborative environmental art and promoting zero-waste practices, seeking ways to harmonise creativity with environmental responsibility.
