As a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, my cross-cultural experiences inform my art. I have dedicated my work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood– both in the United States where I live and the Middle East where I am from.
I am focusing in this project on young women in their twenties – the ages of my own daughters. They are leaving the cocoon of home and entering adulthood. Whereas in earlier projects, I photographed young women in relationship to the curated and controlled environment of their bedrooms, I am photographing them here in the larger environment they find themselves in after they leave home, the more global and complicated backdrop that now constitutes their lives in transitions.
I portray the raw beauty of their age, their individuality, physicality, texture, and mystery. I photograph them the way I, a woman and a mother, see them: beautiful, alive. I create a personal narrative with them. The process is collaborative and the photo session evolves organically as the women become active participants in the image-making process, presiding over the environment, and making it their own. They climbed on rocks and trees, jumped fully dressed in dirty water and waterfalls, crawled under thorns, trespassed into abandoned buildings. Given the space to express themselves, they were willing to experiment and go places neither of us thought possible just moments earlier. As a result I found myself focusing on their strength and their majestic presence.
My work addresses the states of 'Becoming'– the fraught beauty and the vulnerability of growing up –in the context of the visceral relationships to our physical environment and universal humanity, but it is also about collaboration, experimentation, performance, empowerment, and about pushing the limits of creativity and self-expression ‐ both for the young women and for myself.
By collaborating with women in the United States and the Middle East, I focus on our essence, our physicality and the commonalities that make us human, ultimately highlighting how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines.
Rania Matar Biography
Lebanese-born American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography.
Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums, institutions, and private collections worldwide. A mid-career retrospective of her work was recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the American University of Beirut Museum.
Matar received a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in- residency grant, 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2011 and 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition.
She has published three books: L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009. She is currently working on her fourth book SHE (2021) with Radius Books.