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.
Common Ground Films
Bloomington filmmakers Kevin Weaver and Mitch Hannon ran into an issue when pitching their newest documentary, Beyond Vision, about blind kayaker and adventurer Lonnie Bedwell: it wasn't commercial enough. That's why the two of them, along with other local filmmakers, created Common Ground Films, a nonprofit organization centered around telling the stories of individuals who otherwise would not have their stories told.
Associate Producer Jonah Ballard sits down with Kevin Weaver and Mitch Hannon to discuss the founding of Common Ground Films, the story of Lonnie Bedwell, and how to make films when there is no one there to fund them.
Atari Landfill
In 2014, a documentary crew, an academic, and some gaming legends unearthed video game history from a landfill. Actually, it was probably a mix of archeologists and backhoe operators that did the unearthing, but they were all there in Alamogordo, New Mexico to find a treasure trove of Atari ephemera. Writer and educator Raiford Guins tells us the story of how a ton of gaming cartridges from the early 80’s ended up in a landfill in the southwest. In typical Guins fashion, he makes the point that the story that has been repeated, often involving the failure of one game, is more complicated than that.