- This event has passed.
Manal Abu-Shaheen: Mapping Utopia
October 7, 2021 - October 30, 2021
Free
Blue Sky is pleased to announce Mapping Utopia, an exhibition of photographs by Manal Abu-Shaheen.
Artist talk: Saturday, Oct 9, 11 AM – 12 PM | Please visit blueskygallery.org/events to regsiter
Mapping Utopia is a selection of landscape and street photographs from Manal Abu-Shaheen’s ongoing series based in Beirut, where she was born. Shot on location, this series began with exploring advertising and urban construction, two of the driving forces of Beirut’s economy. A decade-long construction boom, aided by foreign investments and neoliberal interest, reshaped the city, rendering it almost unrecognizable. Alongside the development, Abu-Shaheen examines the monumental scale and congestion of western advertising in relationship to the post-war developing urban setting, bringing idealized images of one culture in contact with the realities of another. Motivated by a lack of visual records of the landscape in Lebanon, Abu-Shaheen seeks to build her own photographic archive of what Beirut looks like today: a city dominated by billboards purporting a mythologized western ideal that is incongruous in the post-conflict city.
Image credit: Manal Abu-Shaheen, Picanto Poolside, 2021
