LIKE EVERY LEAVING WASN’T A COUNTRY

IBI IBRAHIM \\ JUNE 7 - 6 SEPTEMBER, 2024

OPENING: 7 June, 17-21h @ ENTRE (Burggasse 24/4, 1070

Like Every Leaving Wasn’t a Country presents a comprehensive look at Yemeni-American artist and filmmaker, Ibi Ibrahim. Spanning a decade of his career, this diverse selection includes portraiture, staged self-portraits, still lives, subtle darkroom experimentations and moving images. These works bring viewers into proximity with the interconnected poetics and politics of Ibrahim’s expansive practice. Each piece leaves a gesture behind, only to rediscover its roots in the next work through personal motifs, historical narratives and a unique visual language that has evolved alongside societal changes in Yemen. The title of the show draws inspiration from a poem by the Mexican-American poet, Vanessa Villarreal* and encapsulates the display’s various thematics surrounding immigration, gender and resilience—all aimed at weaving a subtle journey through the artist’s practice, turning the viewer’s attention to reflections on the body and space as a means of countering flattened views on Yemen and Arab identities.  

*Make Love to Me Like We’ve Never Known Violence, Villarreal 2022.

THE ARTIST

Ibi Ibrahim (b. 1987, Michigan, United States) is a Yemeni-American visual artist, filmmaker and musician. He studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. Ibrahim’s work explores various thematics surrounding immigration, gender and resilience, all marked by notions of in-betweenness, transition and the diasporic human experience. The photowork Ibrahim produced over the past decade aims to offer an idiosyncratic exploration of Arab identities through an artistic approach specifically highlighting queer Arab-American perspectives and intertwining storytelling with care practices, artistic research and advocacy. His work is part of a number of private collections as well as public collections including the British Museum, Colorado College, Arab American National Museum, Barjeel Art Foundation and Durham University Oriental Museum, among others. Selected solo exhibitions include; 21 March 2015, Soma Art Space, Berlin, Germany (2021); Departure / Arrival, The Lab Space, Daarat Al Funun, Amman, Jordan (2017); Lights, Leaves and Yemeni Coffee, JAMM Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2015). Selected group exhibitions include; For Those Who Couldn’t Cross the Sea, Nordic House, Reykjavik, Iceland (2023), Diasporic Tremors, New York University Gallatin Galleries, New York, USA (2023), Cultivate and Grow, Arab American National Museum, Dearborn, USA (2022); Divas: D'Oum Kalthoum à Dalida, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France (2021), Executive (Dis)Order: Art, Displacement, and the Ban, Queens Museum, New York, USA (2018), Walls and Margins, Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2015). 

Ibrahim has been part of numerous art residencies including the Laundromat Project, New York, USA (2022); Arab American National Museum, Dearborn, USA (2020); Soma Art Space, Berlin, Germany (2020); Darat Al Funun, Amman, Jordan (2017); Beirut Art Residency, Beirut, Lebanon (2016); Cites Internationale des Arts, Paris, France (2014) and others. He lives and works in New York. 

THE CURATOR

Lina Ramadan is a Vienna-based curator and writer in contemporary and modern art. She develops research on post-colonial MENA, women artists and solidarities. Between 2016 and 2021, Ramadan was Assistant Curator at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, and a guest curator in 2022. Recent curated exhibitions include: Taysir Batniji: No Condition is Permanent (2022-23), Kader Attia: On Silence with Abdellah Karroum (2021); Raqs Media Collective: Still More World (2019); Mohamed Melehi: 1959-1971 (2017-2018). Publications include: Madness of the Anthropocene: Thinking with an Image, Ed. Ramadan, L. Kaph & 421, forthcoming 2024; “Moments of Return in the work of Mohamed Bourouissa, Yto Barrada and Iman Issa” in Avant-garde & Liberation. Contemporary Art and Decolonial Modernism 2024, Ed. Kravagna, C. Mumok, 2024; “Foreword” in Photography from Yemen Ed. Vartanian Collier, L & Ibrahim, I. Makan Press, 2024; “The Palaver Tree'' in Farid Belkahia: For A New Modernity. Ed. Gauthier, m. Centre Pompidou & Mathaf, 2021. Ramadan is the recipient of the 2024-2025 Darat al Funun Fellowship.  Currently, she’s a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

image above: Arrival (still), 2019, Video, 06: 30 mins