Where do I go?, on view at Obscura Gallery from October 2 to November 21, 2026, presents Rania Matar's photographic collaboration with young women in Lebanon, seeking collectively to commemorate and reimagine the future of a country defined by half a century of conflict and catastrophe. The year 2025 marked fifty years since the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, and half a century later, Lebanon continues to endure the aftermath, compounded by economic collapse, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Beirut Port explosion of August 4, 2020, and subsequent wars in 2024 and 2026. Amid this unraveling, Matar found hope and inspiration in the young generation of women, choosing to focus on their strength, creativity, dignity, and resilience as they considered their options.
The project's title emerged from graffiti Matar saw on a crumbling wall that read in Arabic لوينروح, or Where do I go. She was with Perla, a young woman who threw herself against that wall, and the phrase became the title of this body of work. Matar describes the images as her love letter to the women of Lebanon. She left the country at age twenty to study in the United States in 1984, during the Civil War, in what had been the largest wave of emigration until recently. Many of her subjects find themselves at that same juncture, facing the painful decision of whether to stay or leave. One road leads to separation from family, home, and life as they know it; the other means staying despite fraught conditions, always holding on to hope for better days.
The process is collaborative, with photo sessions evolving organically as the women become active participants in the image-making process, presiding over the environment and making it their own. They climb on rocks and trees, jump fully dressed into dirty water and waterfalls, crawl under thorns, and trespass into abandoned buildings. They embrace life, not afraid of getting dirty, taking risks, and having fun. Given space to express themselves, they experiment and go places neither Matar nor they thought possible just moments earlier. The women, the land, and the architecture are intertwined in photographs that portray the raw beauty of their age, individuality, physicality, texture, and mystery.
Matar, a Lebanese-American artist and mother, has exhibited widely in museums worldwide including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Fotografiska. Her work is part of permanent collections including LACMA, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, and the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. She is the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2022 Leica Women Photo Project Award, and 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant. She has published five books, with Where Do I Go? released in 2026 by Kaph Books. The exhibition at Obscura Gallery in Santa Fe opens with a First Friday reception on October 2 from 5 to 8 pm, followed by a book signing and artist reception on October 24.
Image: Maya (Odalisque With Cat), Beirut, Lebanon, 2024, 19.2 x 24”, archival pigment ink print, edition of 8 © Rania Matar, courtesy of the Obscura Gallery
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