Ahlam Shibli

How do you define ‘home’? How can social, political and colonial context uproot your understanding of the place where you live, turning it into something uncertain and abstract? And under what guises do propaganda and fanaticism infiltrate themselves into people’s houses and daily lives in the name of ideology? All these questions run through the documentary work of Palestinian photographer Ahlam Shibli, currently on show at the Jeu de Paume. From France to Israel via Poland and Palestine, in these works borders disappear into images that can be read as a sort of photographic novel (many of them are accompanied by texts written by the artist), the lives captured within them often seeming to be rooted in the past.

In her determination to show the inevitable conditioning of the people that she meets, Shibli manages to forge links between apparently irreconcilable worlds. Between families who hang posters of martyrs in their sitting rooms and Muslim homosexuals forced to leave their families and homeland to escape intolerance. Between Palestinian volunteers in the Israeli army, Polish orphans captured in the intimacy of their new ‘homes’ and former combatants from Corrèze in southern France who, having resisted the German occupation, fought wars in Indochina and Algeria. Shibli’s ‘homes’ are rarely found between four walls – they’re more often made up of gunpowder and historical drama, cemented with leaps of the collective imagination or emotional need.