Tasweer, in collaboration with Mathaf, invites you to a two-panel discussion (first session in English, the second session in Arabic) between the majority of the participating artists in the I Am The Traveler And Also The Road exhibition. Artist Aissa Deebi and artistic director Charlotte Cotton will guide the conversations in Arabic and English respectively. This event is a unique occasion for the festival and the photographic communities to connect with the photographers, who are courageous in expressing their visual accounts of communities and contexts in the WANA region.
Image: Mona Hassan
About Fatema Bint Ahmad Al-Doh
Qatari documentary photographer Bint Ahmad Al-Doh focuses upon vanishing cultures, remote tribes, minority and indigenous people. Her first photographic project was about a Rashidi tribe that migrated from the Arabian Peninsula to Sudan. She is currently working on a project about the Kalash people who are one of the smallest ethnic minorities of Pakistan and was awarded with the Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award grant in 2022 in support of her continued development of this project. Using embedded approaches of traveling and living with the people she studies and documents, her photographs tend to capture the environments in natural light, with constant human presence in the work.
About Salih Basheer
Salih Basheer originates from Omdurman in Sudan. He has lived in Cairo since 2013 and received his Bachelor of Science degree in Geography from Cairo University. Basheer's passion for photography began when he moved to Cairo and has been integral in helping him rediscover himself and his heritage. He credits the medium of photography as giving him a visual language to fully express himself, alongside of the vital role in his journey as a photographer that living between Khartoum and Cairo has inspired. Basheer photographed the 2021 coup and revolution in Sudan for platforms including AP, Al Jazeera, and Sputnik, and received his Diploma in Photojournalism at DMJX [Danish school of media and journalism] in Copenhagen in the same year.
About Abdo Shanan
Abdo Shanan was born in 1982 in Oran, Algeria to a Sudanese father and an Algerian mother. He studied Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Sirte in Libya and subsequently undertook an internship at the Magnum photography agency in Paris. In 2015, he co-founded the 220Collective – a peer-led organization for Algerian photographers. He won The CAP Prize (Contemporary African Photography) in 2019 for his project entitled Dry and, in the same year, he was selected for The Joop Swart Masterclass by World Press Photo. In 2020, he was the recipient of Premi Mediterrani Albert Camus Incipiens and co-curated an exhibition, Narratives from Algeria at Photoforum Pasquar in Switzerland. Shanan was a recipient of the Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project award in 2022 for the further development of his A Little Louder project and publication, which intensely maps the experiences of Algerians who participated in the ‘Hirak’ protests since February 2019.
About Samar Sayed Baiomy
Born in 1990, Samar Sayed Baiomy is a visual artist living and working in Alexandria.
She studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Alexandria University and then learned photography and video art during a two-year grant award scheme at the École supérieure d'art d'Aix-en-Provence, France. Baiomy’s visual and research-based practice concentrates on documenting people's lives and self-identities, and the relationships between home, inhabitance, and memory. She was awarded a 2021 Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award grant for her Revive Memories project that stems from Baiomy’s PhD research into the destruction of the fishing village El Max in Alexandria. Using photography, oral history, archival research and field notes, she pieces together a collective memory of a fast-disappearing time and place.
About Mohammed Elshamy
Mohammed Elshamy was 17 years of age when he received the Egyptian Press Award in 2011, while he was an apprentice photojournalist at the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. In 2014, he was a recipient of the Magnum Foundation Human Rights Fellowship in New York. He has chronicled human crises in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and Nigeria and his photographs have been published by global media including The Guardian newspaper, Al Jazeera and Time magazine. Elshamy’s extensive project - Egyptians Exiled - takes us into the violent heart of August 2013, and Egypt’s regime change, uprising and public massacre in Cairo of 800 people in the Rabaa and Nahda public squares. He brings us into quiet contemplation of the impact upon individuals and families who form a new wave of Egyptian Diaspora identity.
About Mona Hassan
Mona Hassan is a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Alexandria University, Egypt. She has been a practicing photographer of impressive energy, focus and critical acclaim since 2016. She is well known for her photographs of the limestone quarry workers in the Manya Governorate of Upper Egypt, demonstrating her capacity to create unforgettable images of remote and underrepresented human life. Hassan has used her 2021 Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award to create a vital record of her travels through the governorates of Egypt over the past 2 years with a nomadic Arab tribe in search of pasture for their livestock. Through her photographs and extensive field notes, Hassan takes us on a remarkable journey into ways of life and human stories that we can only encounter through Hassan’s close vantage point.
About Shaima Al-Tamimi
Shaima Al-Tamimi is a Yemeni-East African visual storyteller based in Qatar. Her work is an inspirational melding of her and her family’s story and the social and cultural issues it reflects. She explores themes relating to patterns and impacts of migration and identity. Through the mediums of photography, film, and writing, Al-Tamimi interweaves historical and family archives with her photographic portraits, and builds upon her deeply-rooted and highly-personal documentary approach in new and unexpected ways. In 2020, she was awarded a Photography and Social Justice Fellowship by the Magnum Foundation, where she developed her multimedia project and film Don’t Get Too Comfortable. In 2021, it was nominated for the Orrizonti Award for Best Short film at the 78th Venice International Film Festival (La Biennale) and was the first Yemeni film to have participated at Venice to date. Don’t Get Too Comfortable is an expansion of her long term project As if we never came, which is currently on show at Mathaf in partnership with Tasweer Photo Festival Qatar, who awarded Al-Tamimi a 2021 Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award grant. Her project has also been supported by the Arab Documentary Photography Program and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, and received additional support from Women Photograph + Nikon USA, and the Prince Claus Fund.
About Rula Halawani
Artist Rula Halawani focuses on the impact of occupation on space and nature - tracing the lives and histories that can still be found in often overlooked details, whether in the material culture of Palestinian society or the transformed landscapes of her childhood. She holds a BFA from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and an MFA from the University of Westminster, London. Halawani lives in her home city of East Jerusalem and has exhibited extensively and internationally. Halawani’s exhibitions include the Ayyam Gallery, For You Mother, Dubai (2023); Guangdong Museum of Art, China (2021); 58th international Art Exhibition, - La Biennale Di Venezia (2019); Palestinian Museum, Birzeit (2019, 2017); American University Museum, Washington DC, USA (2018); Canadian War Museum, Ottawa (2017); Mediterranean Women Forum, Jerez del la Frontera, Cádiz (2017); The Hagop Kevorkian Center, New York (2016), National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC (2016); Ayyam Gallery (2016); Selma Feriani Gallery, London (2013, 2010); Al Hoash Gallery, Jerusalem (2009); and Botanique Museum, Brussels. Halawani has featured in recent collective exhibitions at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia (2017); Metropolitan State University, Denver (2017); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg (2015); MART Museum, Rovereto (2014); FotoFest Biennial, Houston (2014); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); and BOZAR, Palace for Fine Arts, Brussels (2011). Halawani’s photographs are housed in the international collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Nadour Collection, Germany; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The British Museum; London, The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. Palestine (2008), the artist’s first monograph, was published by La Lettre Volée, Brussels in conjunction with her mid career retrospective at the Botanique Museum. In 2016, Halawani received a residency fellowship at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and was awarded the 2021 Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award.