Where Do I Go?
Overview
Coming Soon
2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War. As we reach this symbolic date, Lebanon still suffers from its consequences.
In Where Do I Go?, Rania Matar collaborates with women to visually tell their story and their relationship to this beautiful and broken country. She sees her younger self in these women as she herself was 20 when she left Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War. The process is collaborative, and the photo session always evolves organically as the women become active participants in the image-making process, presiding over the environment, and making it their own.
In her words: “While my photographs may not provide solutions or closure, I hope they nevertheless invite the viewer to pause and find the beauty, the hope, the shared humanity, and the grace that still exist despite everything. They are my love letters to the women of Lebanon. This project is for us all: the ones who stayed and the ones who left but can never leave.”
About the Artist
Rania Matar
Born and raised in Lebanon Matar moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born Palestinian/American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography. Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide in solo and group shows, including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Carnegie Museum of Art, ICA/Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Fotografiska, Institut du Monde Arabe, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums. A mid-career retrospective of her work was on view at Cleveland Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and American University of Beirut Museum. Additional solo museum exhibitions in include Middlebury Museum of Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, Rollins Museum of Art, and the Eskenazi Museum at Indiana University. Matar received several awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2021 (also 2011, 2007) Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants, 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Oskar Barnack Award 2023, Arnold Newman Prize 2022, and Outwin Portrait Competition 2022 with an exhibition at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery/DC. She recently curated “Louder Than Hearts”, a group exhibition of women from the Arab World and Iran at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. Matar serves on the board of BeMA US, the Beirut Museum of Art USA chapter. IN addition to “Where Do I Go?” Matar published four books: SHE, 2021; L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009.
About the Authors
Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert
Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert is an American curator, critic, and author. She is the inaugural Curator of Contemporary Art at the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University and was a 2023–24 Propel Fellow with the Association of Art Museum Curators. Previously Art Editor of Newcity and Assistant Curator at the Block Museum of Art, her writing has appeared in the Journal of Visual Studies, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, Newcity, and The Seen. She holds dual MAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA with honors from Northwestern University.
Youmna Melhem Chamieh
Youmna Melhem Chamieh is a French-Lebanese writer and editor whose work centers on the crosscurrents of memory, place, and imagination. Her writing has appeared in Harper's Magazine, British Vogue, the Financial Times, Zoetrope, the Harvard Lampoon, the Harvard Human Rights Review, and Harper's Bazaar, among other publications. She is currently at work on a novel, with support from various fellowships, and serves as the editor-in-chief of Guernica, an award-winning magazine dedicated to global art and literature.
Kim Ghattas
Kim Ghattas is a Middle East expert, author and a Emmy award winning journalist with twenty years of experience covering the Middle East and American foreign policy. A long-time BBC correspondent based in Beirut and Washington DC, she now writes regular opinion columns for The Atlantic and the Financial Times. She’s the author for the New York Times 2020 notable book Black Wave, and the New York Times 2013 best seller The Secretary. She was born and raised in Beirut and is currently working on her next book.
Georges Boustany
Georges Boustany is a photography collector, archivist, and writer. His collection documents Lebanon’s daily history across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He instigated La guerre du Liban au jour le jour, a Facebook page sharing forty-year-old newspaper extracts from L’Orient-Le Jour, and Avant-d’oublier, a project based on ten thousand recovered vernacular photographs. Since 2017, he’s been publishing fortnightly essays on these images, later compiled into two publications. Boustany graduated from the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris
Rania Matar
Born and raised in Lebanon Matar moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born Palestinian/American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography. Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide in solo and group shows, including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Carnegie Museum of Art, ICA/Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Fotografiska, Institut du Monde Arabe, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums. A mid-career retrospective of her work was on view at Cleveland Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and American University of Beirut Museum. Additional solo museum exhibitions in include Middlebury Museum of Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, Rollins Museum of Art, and the Eskenazi Museum at Indiana University. Matar received several awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2021 (also 2011, 2007) Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants, 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Oskar Barnack Award 2023, Arnold Newman Prize 2022, and Outwin Portrait Competition 2022 with an exhibition at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery/DC. She recently curated “Louder Than Hearts”, a group exhibition of women from the Arab World and Iran at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. Matar serves on the board of BeMA US, the Beirut Museum of Art USA chapter. IN addition to “Where Do I Go?” Matar published four books: SHE, 2021; L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009.
Technical Details
- Publication Date:
- Monday, October 20, 2025
- Language:
- English & Arabic
- Format:
- Hardcover
- Dimensions:
- 30 x 24 cm
- Weight:
- 1 kg
- ISBN:
- 978-614-8065-00-2
- Number of Pages:
- 264
- Publisher:
- Kaph Books