Sama Alshaibi

Tterss (Palimpsest) comprises mixed-media collages and the video Roadwork, emerging from Sama Alshaibi’s return to Iraq after a forty-year exile. Moving between documentation and speculation, the project considers how a city shaped by modernist ambition can be reread through rupture.

The work turns to the mid-20th century as a formative moment in Iraq’s geopolitical ascent, when architecture, planning, and civic life articulated national aspirations. Alshaibi layers her photographs of Baghdad with vernacular imagery and family photographs, architectural archives connected to Rifat Chadirji, and LiDAR scans she made across Baghdad. The result is an image field where multiple temporalities press against one another. Baghdad appears as a palimpsest marked by interrupted futures and the dissonance between remembered place and the estrangement of return.

In Roadwork, contemporary footage and LiDAR data trace the rhythms of daily movement through the city, where damaged infrastructure and ordinary circulation register endurance, pressure, and strain. Together, the works hold Baghdad as both image and “residue.”