Narrative Conflict: Ahlam Shibli’s “Phantom Home”
By Kevin Jones
AHLAN SHIBLI, Untitled (Death no. 33), 2011
Palestinian photographer Ahlam Shibli’s show “Phantom Home” at Paris’s Jeu de Paume museum is as much an exercise in reading as it is in looking. Shibli has crafted copious captions to accompany six narrative-style photographic series that broadly examine the notion of home and its loss. It is unsurprising, therefore, that words are at the center of a controversy that has included bomb scares and death threats, pitting artist and institution against vociferous pro-Israel lobbies who demand nothing less than the show’s closure.
