Beirut: Theater of Dreams

Beirut: Theater of Dreams
Date & Time Apr 23 - Aug 31 2018 12:00 AM - 12:00 AM
Department Bernstein Gallery
Audience Open to the Public

Exhibition: April 23 - August 2018

Reception: April 27, 2018, 6:00-8:00 p.m.

In her Beirut series, Manal Abu-Shaheen plays with perception and reality by photographing western advertisements in the midst of the scarred urban landscape of her birth city Beirut. The huge billboards that loom over the city harken back to drive-in movies where viewers are transported to another place and time as they sit in their cars.

Manal Abu-Shaheen is a Lebanese-American photographer currently living and working in Long Island City, New York. She was born in Beirut in 1982 and moved from Lebanon to New York in 2000. Abu-Shaheen received a MFA in photography from the Yale University School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut, in 2011. Her work has been exhibited at the Queens Museum, Queens, New York (2016); The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, Colorado (2016); The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York (2015); The Print Shop at MoMA PS1, Queens, New York (2014); Camera Club of New York, New York (2013); and Welch School of Art and Design Galleries, Atlanta (2012), among others. She is a recipient of the 2016/17 A.I.R Gallery Fellowship and the 2015 Artist in the Marketplace Residency program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. She currently teaches at the City College of New York.