Sama Alshaibi’s newest body of work from her solo exhibition Staging the Imagined, reflects the relationships of power and authority between photographer and subject. The work investigates how a particular historical period can alter viewers’ interpretations of photographs. Through various projects, Alshaibi reframes historical photographs and moving images that according to Grace Aneiza Ali “reference a grave historic malpractice—the role of photography, both colonial and contemporary, in reducing the body, the life, the desires, the experiences, the hopes and dreams, indeed the very existence, of the Middle Eastern woman to a dangerous single story—one rooted in the primitive and in fear, fantasy, inferiority, and objectification.”. In her central project, Carry Over, Alshaibi alludes to the ‘Oriental’ portrait photographs of the region’s women
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