Artist talk: October 9, 11 am PT at Blue Sky | REGISTER

Blue Sky October Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 12 - 5 PM

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.

Manal Abu-Shaheen (Lebanese-American, b. 1982) was born in Beirut and currently lives and works in the Bronx, NY. Her solo exhibitions include 2d Skin, Soloway, Brooklyn, NY; Theater of Dreams, Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University, NJ; and Beta World City, LORD LUDD, Philadelphia, PA. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at SUNY Old Westbury, NY; The Society of Korean Photography, Seoul, Korea; Queens Museum, NY; and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY. She is a recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship Grant, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, A.I.R Gallery Fellowship, and AIM Residency at the Bronx Museum. Abu-Shaheen holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and M.F.A in Photography from Yale School of Art. She teaches at The City College of New York.