In Sitting Room, 1987 Nadia Shihab revisits images photographed by her mother with attention to the inconsistencies at the margins. Placed alongside each other the images reveal an interior panorama, where the end of one image leads to the beginning of another. By looking closely at her own mother’s ‘looking’, Sitting Room, 1987 retraces moments of rupture and possibility by asking: what does it mean to look and look again?

Commissioned for the ECU Urban Screen, Sitting Room, 1987 revisits material from Shihab’s earlier work Echolocation (2021) exploring the translation of familial archives for an evolving public audience.

Original Photographs by Lahib Jaddo
(Baghdad, 1987)

Scanned and edited by Nadia Shihab
(Vancouver, 2023

Digital video, 16 min on loop, silent

Urban Screen at Libby Leschold Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Nov 2023-March 2024