Throughout Two Many years, Rania Matar Images Lebanon Via War and Displacement

Lebanese-born Palestinian American photographer Rania Matar has all the time tuned her lens to the intimate psychological particulars of her topics. In “Where Do I Go? لوين روح,” Matar expands her scope, tracing the thread of nationwide historical past via the lives of roughly twenty ladies photographed between 2020 and 2025. In its hybrid concern of historic and private narrative, the exhibition is as a lot a deep reflection on the fifty-year legacy of the Lebanese Civil War and its parallels to the present Israeli-Lebanese battle as it’s a retrospective of Matar’s maturation as an artist and individual. 

It appears becoming that such an exhibition be held at Robert Klein Gallery x Sea-Dar’s The Project Space. The results of two powerhouse names of their respective fields of images and building, the house occupies half of a large, refurbished warehouse-turned-office constructing sitting liminally between the sting of the South End and I-93. Trained as an architect earlier than she discovered images, Matar possesses an beautiful sensitivity to setting and composition. She encourages from viewers a type of wandering, nonlinear building of narrative, with every wide-walled part of the gallery vaguely clustered round time interval, tone, or landmark.

A couple of of Matar’s massive digital prints cling on the wall on the mouth of the gallery entrance, separated from the remainder of the present. One of those, hung reverse the exhibition wall textual content, exhibits Fawzia, a lady carrying a beige costume and a white, unraveling hijab, hanging her head over poles that bisect a bus cease. Because a steel pole within the foreground hides her neck, her physique seems actually cut up between the 2 opposite-pointing indicators—one to Beirut, the opposite to Choueifat—as if by guillotine. The roadside second is caught up in a myriad of ambiguities, the place she appears at relaxation however maybe out of exhaustion, the place the apricot dusklight sweetens the bleakness of the bus cease. This {photograph}, right down to its spatial association, is a microcosm for the exhibit as a complete: a dreamlike vista conjured to specific the complicated emotional hues of displacement.

The Lebanese Civil War, which started roughly in 1975 and continued till 1990, is each central to and visibly absent from the work. Its presence is summoned all the time at slant: in bullet holes on deserted, collapsing buildings, in wind yawning via the window of a blown-open wall. Once known as the “Paris of the Middle East,” Beirut was a well-liked metropolitan vacation spot for vacationers from the Fifties to Nineteen Seventies. Investing in its international attraction, the nation constructed varied inns, such because the Aley Grand Hotel, the Holiday Inn, Long Beach Club, and modernist arts areas, together with The Egg cinema constructing and Piccadilly Theatre, with each intention of increasing its bustling downtown sectors. But with the outbreak of the conflict, lots of the locations that promised a future, or on the very least the implication of progress, have been razed to the bottom. Matar herself watched as a toddler whereas the Holiday Inn Beirut was shelled till it was engulfed in flames. For years the constructing stood as a blackened carcass, a monument to what might have been.

Like glamorous apparitions, Matar’s topics float via these websites symbolic of Beirut’s pre-war abundance in high quality, richly coloured silks. In Lara H. (Bullet Holes), Abandoned Zahle Cinema, Zahle, Lebanon (2024), the silhouette of a lady stands in a brightly illuminated window; she presses her hand in opposition to the glass which separates her from a darkened room the place bullet holes in a door create a constellation of speckled mild throughout the ground. Shadows and light-weight, presence and absence are inverted such that the vacancy of the photograph turns into its incontestable fullness. In Tamara (with a Camera Obscura Reflection of Burj El Murr Tower), Beirut, Lebanon (2025) the topic’s again is turned to the digital camera, most of her physique veiled in shadow save for the brilliant, formidable picture of Burj El Murr Tower operating alongside the curvature of her backbone. The forty-story tower was one other monument claimed by the conflict, ultimately turning into a snipers’ nest as a result of it stood alongside what was then the Green Line—the no man’s land that separated East and West Beirut throughout the Civil War. Tamara might see the tower from her residence window, the identical residence the place Matar, a 12 months in the past, constructed a digital camera obscura to depict its threatening presence imprinting itself on her like a tattoo. Though the ladies photographed within the assortment didn’t stay via the conflict, they nonetheless stay with it.

Rather than go for a realist documentation of the demolition for the consumption of Western audiences, Matar reanimates the buildings with a surreal, hauntological mode. Coined by French deconstructionist thinker Jacques Derrida, hauntology (hantologie)—a portmanteau of “haunting” and “ontology”—appeared in his 1993 ebook, Specters of Marx. Hauntology was initially launched as a counter to Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 declare that the collapse of the Soviet Union signalled the top of ideological evolution and that both the domination of Western liberal democracy or takeover of worldwide capitalism have been inevitable.¹ For Derrida, hauntology was an idea that would make seen the virtuality of the previous and future within the current. Though absent in that the previous has occurred and the longer term is a latent potentiality, each forces proceed to have an effect on, certainly assemble, the current like spooky motion at a distance. In Derrida’s case it meant that the specter of Marxism, regardless of its precise political failure, nonetheless disrupts the current with its penumbral presence-in-absence, its beguiling ideological promise to the unsolved issues of a dominating capitalist system. In Matar’s images, the very land is haunted by promised futures that by no means arrived, by the unlearned classes of the previous doomed to recur.

This hauntological mode permits Matar to speak the fragmentation of Lebanon’s nationwide identification and the disrupted lives of her topics. Toward the again of the exhibition, Matar introduces three pearls of knowledge from Etel Adnan, the well-known Lebanese author and painter, whose quotes are printed alongside the gallery partitions. One wall bears a quote from In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), the place Adnan compares herself to the land: “I am both an American and an Arab and these identities are sometimes at odd with each other, not every day, not even often, but once in a great while I become a mountain that some terrifying earthquake has split.”² Another quote from her assortment of letters, Of Cities & Women, describes how in post-war Lebanon, “The women have kept contact with the earth … in the ancient roles of witnesses and memory keepers.”3 Adnan’s intertextual body illuminates the personal-national situation Matar captures along with her lens.

But what continues to be lacking on this description, which shines like an excellent north star within the exhibition, is the phrase imaginaries. There is within the images, as Adnan herself felt, an ungainly cut up between the topics and the areas they inhabit, a disjointedness of time. Yet it is usually true that the panorama and the portrait are inseparable on this exhibition; the landmarks of Beirut’s and Matar’s topics are mutually constitutive, expressive of each other. These ladies change into vessels for multivalent communication, reflecting the tales of the land, of their very own particular person struggles, the struggles of a nation, even the artist’s personal private struggles. They pose as Venus; they veil their faces with hair and flowers; they stand and stare; they lay and drape and measure their reflections; they billow within the wind and wash ashore and dance with ghosts. Matar explains in her challenge assertion that these comportments come up from an natural means of collaborative embodiment, the place she permits her topics to change into energetic individuals within the creation of the picture, following their impulses about the right way to transfer via their environments. Despite the truth that most of Matar’s topics by no means skilled the conflict firsthand, she invitations them to think about alongside her, creating, in essence, a dimension that straddles the road between actuality and artifice, previous and current. This hybrid methodology of staged composition and intuitive spontaneity is exactly what animates the photographs with an uncanny magnificence. It is a newer improvement in Matar’s observe, one which has taken form prior to now six years.

Proof of this alteration comes alongside the again edges of the exhibition, the place chosen works from Matar’s earlier collection sit alongside this most up-to-date one, themselves haunting the current physique of labor with previous types since developed. One sees the candid spontaneity and documentary efforts of an earlier challenge, the hanging black-and-white movie collection Ordinary Lives (2007–09). In her earliest works, Matar’s tact manifested itself within the dynamism and verve of her candids, usually angular or motion-blurred. But staged composition has additionally been a observe in Matar’s work for a few years now, notably since she switched to digital shade images and ventured into portraiture. Matar’s portraits are by no means decollated profiles; she captures her topics’ spatial comportment, letting each gesture, each awkward sidelong look, talk the presence of who they’re. Eventually Matar started extra absolutely incorporating setting into the narrative of the portrait, as within the collection A Girl and Her Room and On Either Side of the Window, the place the road between interiority and exteriority was blurred. From these middle-period works, not on view within the exhibition, one senses the echoes between Matar’s personal fraught experiences as a lady immigrant and people of the ladies whom she images. Her digital camera is almost all the time self-reflexive. From her topics she attracts sure metaphysical situations—adolescence, growing old, grief, pleasure—that make of their concrete experiences one thing archetypal. What is exceptional about Matar’s earlier work is that she unveils the common hidden plainly within the specific.

But “Where Do I Go?” is now not a documentation of the true, or what merely is, as in Matar’s earlier works. Rather, it’s a new, imaginative rediscovery and retelling of what may very well be, what might have been, what isn’t. This impact might solely be achieved by Matar’s foray into the simulated; in that blurred line between the true and imagined, a portal opens for the ghosts of the previous to own the work. It is thru the method of imagining that the is and isn’t are capable of talk. If the query of the exhibition is “Where Do I Go?,” Matar finds a approach of selecting each and neither response on the similar time. A delicate, humanist photographer from her first assortment, Matar’s photographic pursuits heart on Lebanese and American experiences, utilizing the specificity of people to create dynamic, multidimensional representations of identification. No doubt, rising up in Lebanon, the place ethnic and non secular heterogeneity has been each the founding precept and self-destructive impulse of its nationhood, imprinted on Matar the necessity to painting folks and her residence(s) as uniquely complicated.

What Matar affords on this exhibition isn’t purely hauntological, not merely a sterile description of a cultural deadlock. She effectually creates a brand new mythology alongside the ladies she images, whose goals conflict dramatically in opposition to the arduous line of historical past and one another. Embodying the landscapes of Beirut in all method of symbolic parallels, Matar’s topics attempt to create a visible language for the flux and fragmentation of that identification. Angela stands as a sand-colored Doric column within the Temple of Bacchus in Baalbek. Tara melds with completely different flowers rising across the area. Lujain lays in an empty pool carrying a costume the colour of water. Rhea wears a costume the identical colours of the previous bar or playing room she stands in on the Aley Grand Hotel, which was as soon as often called the “bride of the summers.” Aya stands subsequent to a graffitied picture of an eye fixed in Gemmayze; her title echoes that of the constructing that watches her, and the viewer. Matar’s ladies, vaguely iconographic but all the time particular person, recast the landmarks of Beirut in a brand new mild.

Adnan, one of many present’s Beirutian specters, stated of magnificence that “It’s more than shapes and color. It’s more than what you see. Your total inner world.”⁴ With “Where Do I Go?,” Matar succeeds in bringing to life a fancy type of magnificence that blends seen and unseen. Expanding on strategies current in her early works to a strikingly surreal impact, she captures the liminalities of displacement with grace. Matar has given us another excuse to imagine within the redemptive energy of magnificence.

—1 Mark Fisher, “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly Vol. 66, No. 1 (Fall 2012), 16.
—2  Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (City Lights Publishers, 2005), 71.
—3 Etel Adnan, Of Cities & Women: Letters to Fawwaz (The Post-Apollo Press, 1993), 73.
—4  Van Gogh Museum Extra, “Etel Adnan – Colour as Language,” YouTube video, 7:27, May 18, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odzjLhDDKdc.

“Rania Matar: Where Do I Go? لوين روح” is on view via October 3, 2026, at RKG x Sea-Dar, 580 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA.