Sham Enbashi (b. 1988, Syria), studied Architecture at AUS, U.A.E., and was a fellow at the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF) in AbuDhabi in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design.

I work with the medium of photography to question the relation between our objective and subjective reality; the relationship between the world out there and our internal experience of it. Crafting scenes with precision and sensibility has a direct relation to my interpretation of the metaphors embedded in each of the objects and acts in each scene. I aim to draw the attention of the viewers through the stylized look in my photography, hoping that it will lead them to question the content of the photos beyond their initial visual impact.

In my 2017 photography exhibition ‘When I Met Myself’, I recreated themes of duality from Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ that deals with metaphysics and denying reality as we know it. Taking that as a starting point, I choreographed a set of still images that portray the life of two twins across a non linear timeline of their life. In one image the twins are the same age and in the other, one of the twins is older. My aim was to manipulate our expectations of time within a human setting.There is always an offering that has to be made in order to inhabit higher effectiveness in life, and for me that happens through systematically questioning our conditioned belief system.

Borges claims that all fantastic literature works follow four essential strategies: “the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time, and the double.” Based on that, Sham aims to create in her work an aesthetic system, in which what matters most is not the ideas themselves, but their suggestions and resonances, the excitement and drama of their possibilities and impossibilities.