Rania Matar has been photographing women and girls for most of her career. It started with images of her children and expanded into an artistic practice that includes women from Lebanon, her home country, and women in the United States where she has lived since the 1980s. After 9/11, she wanted to express the shared humanity of people from both cultures, in a tangible way, through her photographs.
She has explored the lives of teenage girls through portraits in their bedrooms, surrounded by the things they’ve chosen for their personal spaces as they are forming their independent identities. She did a project featuring 12-year-old girls, capturing the awkward beauty at the edge of puberty.
Her latest project is called “Where do I go?” It is an exhibition and a book featuring portraits of women in Lebanon in their early twenties, around the age she was when she left her home country. The portraits are staged in abandoned buildings around Beirut and in natural landscapes like apple orchards and fields of poppies. Rania collaborates with the women to choose locations of personal or social significance.
The project was timed to be released at the 50-year anniversary of the start of Lebanon’s civil war. The exhibition opened in March, 2026 at the Sydney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University. The photographs are on display through August 02, 2026 in the Rhonda and Anthony Moravec Gallery, Center for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs on the third floor. The book, Where do I go? Is available in the museum gift shop and it features essays about Rania’s work, including a piece by Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert. Leila is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Eskenazi Museum, and the curator for this exhibition.
Kayte Young spoke with Leila and Rania about the exhibit, their collaboration and about the joys and challenges of working and creating in such a complicated place.
