The exhibition presents new and existing works across media that continue the artist’s study and artistic reinterpretation of healing and ceremonial migratory practices of people of the Arabian Peninsula who seek to repair one’s relationship with oneself, the earth, and other beings. In Farah’s work, images of landscape and the body merge, tracing affinities between geologic time, somatic movement, ancestral knowledge, and ceremonial rituals. In her performance and video works, movement manifests as an embodiment of agency through which she explores ways to reimagine traditional practices to address trauma, the marginalization of women and immigrant people, and the climate crisis today. 

Featuring work of Lithostatic series and Uninhibited: People of the Earth in a solo exhibition by Farah Salem.

Tala Gallery’s Inaugural Group Exhibition showcases artworks by Chaveli Sifre (Berlin), Kushala Vora (Chicago) , Kiam Marcelo Junio (Chicago) , Ang Ziqi Zhang (NYC) , Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty (Paris), Farah Salem (Chicago) , Corrine Slade (Chicago) , Roland Knowlden (Chicago) , Roland Santana (Chicago) , Jasmine Huaimin Yeh (Chicago) , Nicole Ji Soo Kim (Toronto), Isra Rene (Chicago) 

‘eroding territory’ is a group exhibition curated by Cecilia González Godino.

The exhibition features works by: Alberta Whittle, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Assaf Evron, Christina Leslie, Farah Salem, Kara Springer, Marigold Santos, Martha Atienza, Nep Sidhu and Sebastián Maquieira.

The term “territory” comes from the Latin terra torium or “the land that belongs to someone.” To speak of “territory,” or to approach geopolitical history in “territorial” terms, therefore entails an alleged human right of possession of the land—that has too often granted ownership of its natural resources and its inhabitants to those claiming its “discovery.”

With the notion of territory also came the superficial and artificial delimitation of the natural space, creating the illusion of containment and of borders to respond to imperial needs, and to then articulate a national identity. Colonial mappings emptied the environment of meaning, both delineating its possibilities and disregarding those geological and subaltern elements that exist beyond the superficial and flattening vision that western imperatives imposed on the Earth. 

The artists featured in this exhibition dismantle colonial structures of landscape by reclaiming a geological agency that allows them to dive into the sediments and layers of their diasporic identities—to dive into a “terra” with multiple spaces, undercurrents, and temporalities.

Brushwood Center, in partnership with Hyde Park Art Center and collector, artist, and environmental scientist Patric McCoy, presents an exhibition of artwork celebrating the different ways in which we connect with and are shaped by nature.
Connecting to our Common Ground is a special exhibition in honor of Brushwood Center's 2023 Smith Nature Symposium Awardee, Baratunde Thurston. In his PBS show, America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston, Thurston travels the country to uncover our complex relationship with the outdoors. In this exhibition, we explore the ways that artists from different communities experience the natural world. 

The Hyde Park Art Center is proud to present a micro-exhibition of works by Regina Agu and Farah Salem that reflect on the relationship between geography, the body, and the histories and traditions embedded in landscapes. Agu’s interest in landscapes, particularly of the Gulf South began as a lens-based biographical exploration, and grew into a deep visual study of Black geographies and spatial concerns informed by her academic training in policy studies and data science. Salem’s most recent multimedia installations trace relationships between land and ancestral healing practices. Informed by her profession as an art therapist and counselor applying somatic-based therapies for trauma healing, research and experiments with movement-based and musical traditions from the Arabian Peninsula, Salem’s practice explores the potential erasure of socio-cultural conditioning that influences and distorts shared realities.

Since 2004, Newcity has featured an even 160 artists, many of whom have since gone on to significant careers. This year, Newcity evolved the process they go through to identify our artists to include input from a much wider constituency of voices in the art community, settling on a shortlist of 130 that whittled down to their largest group ever. Meet the ten Breakout Artists of 2023 and see their work, at the Breakout Artists Exhibition at the Chicago Artists Coalition opening on April 12. (Brian Hieggelke)

ENGAGE Projects is pleased to present The Land Between the Sea, a group exhibition organized by guest curator Noah Hanna, featuring the work of Juan Molina Hernández, M_m<M, SaraNoa Mark, and Farah Salem. Taking inspiration from Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, The Land Between the Sea references the experience of nepantla, a Nahuatl word for a space between two bodies of water or worlds, as well as a manifestation of personal, social, spiritual, and cultural ‘in between-ness.’ This exhibition explores the desert as a space in which history, geography, and identity exist in a state of perpetual transition.

Though the desert often evokes a particular geopolitical and environmental border zone, these artists instead consider how our personal labors within the landscape produce our roots, narratives, and identities, encouraging us to perceive the desert as a space that is both the product of human existence and in opposition to it.

Crossings, is a duo exhibition featuring new works by current HATCH 2021-2022 artists-in-residence Anwulika Anigbo and Farah Salem, curated by Yi Cao.  The exhibition will be on view from April 15 - May 26, 2022.

Historically, human migrations across the Atlantic Ocean, Sahara Desert, and Red Sea, spurred by colonization and capitalism, have had catastrophic consequences. In their respective works, Anigbo and Salem invoke personal experiences and reference the sacred and mythical West African and Afro-Arab worlds, to illuminate cultural hybridity and transformation.

Informed by Chinua Achebe’s African Trilogy and Wole Soyinka’s poetry, Anigbo brings family migration, Igbo mythological themes, and pre-colonial realities in dialogue with the practice of everyday life. Whether capturing the vulnerability of her family through photography or accessing her ancestral home on canvas, Anigbo asks: what is the purpose of collecting memory outside of proving our legitimacy in a battle to fabricate a truth viewed as absolute?  Salem reimagines instruments used in healing rituals by historically oppressed and socially isolated groups of women to mitigate the anxiety and stressors during the radical societal shift after the oil discoveries and the pre-oil era in Kuwait. Through archives, oral stories, and personal memories, Salem traces this practice in the Arabian peninsula that originally came from the East African Diaspora to reactivate the musical sound and dance movement that welcome varied contemporary interpretations.

This exhibition sees the artists, both rooted initially in photography, expand their respective practices into new media such as fiber-materials, natural pigments, media installation, paintings, and performance. The complementary media draw visitors to the intersection of many lands, memories, and truths, ultimately connecting across the wounds, healing, and scar tissue of history.

Farah Salems' Uninhibited: People of the Earth project is supported in part by the Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Under the theme of women at the French Pavilion in Expo Dubai 2022, The International Women Photographers Award will hold a retrospective 2017-2020 for previous award winners. Farah Salem’s Cornered series will be featured at the pavilion.

Beautiful Diaspora / You Are Not the Lesser Part advocates dialogue and solidarity across the spectrum of experiences of global artists of color and Black diasporic artists. Two exhibition concepts and their interchangeable titles intertwine as one, breaking with more frequent traditions of ethnically separated and disconnected exhibition spaces in museology and the art world.

A global forum on beautiful Blackness, Beautiful Diaspora considers contemporary art as central to the portrayal of expansiveness—beyond a single-country scope, political commodity, or compressed narrative. This beautiful expansiveness exists as a testament to Black spatial wandering and assertion, existing beyond assumptions and boundaries.

You Are Not the Lesser Part challenges the pervasive social casualness of assigning bodies of color to the category “minority” (quite a mis-imagining). Neither negligible nor small, the significance of our presence is not the lesser part of anything. The description word "minor" does not match our fullness, agency, and dreams.

The visual conversation among this full group of fifteen artists defies the imposed political distances and legacies of colonialism that prefer they (we) neither align nor meet. There is a significance, and a hope, to diverse Black and global artists of color together in shared space.

Beautiful Diaspora/You Are Not the Lesser Part will feature photo and multidisciplinary artists Xyza Cruz Bacani, Widline Cadet, Jessica Chou, Cog•nate Collective (Amy Sanchez Arteaga and Misael Diaz), Işıl Eğrikavuk, Citlali Fabián, Sunil Gupta, Kelvin Haizel, David Heo, Damon Locks, Johny Pitts, Farah Salem, Ngadi Smart, Tintin Wulia, and the debut of Abena Appiah. 

-Asha Iman Veal, Curatorial Fellow 

I Sense Something Has Changed examines the liminal state of perception, holding space for the intuitive moment when one is situated at a sensory threshold. 2021 HATCH residents delve into the multisensorial aspects of artmaking, as well as the metaphorical landscape of awareness, understanding, knowing, and interaction. How do our bodies, lead by touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste come to understand the present world amidst a pandemic that deprives the familiar and activates the unfamiliar? When our senses unfold as sites of voluntary and involuntary memory, what does it mean to sensate, to recall, and to forget? How might we recognize the reverence of human touch, in a time when many have gone without? And how will this shift, this purported moment of awareness, move us towards care for ourselves and one another? Housed in the physical gallery setting, in their sensorial materiality the artists’ objects and images mean to emphasize their co-presence they share with each viewer.

The exhibition will feature an interactive library of senses, as well as curated programming that further explores the senses through collaboration. Additional details will be announced at a later date.

Presenting works by Farah Salem, Hannah Bates, and Zuleyka Alejandro. Informed by their historic, cultural and professional backgrounds, the artists’ work through an ecofeminist lens. Earth (Em)Body explores the intersections between non-human agents, craft processes, and formations of the natural world.

Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and a renewed reckoning over racial justice and inequality, The Long Dream invites visitors to see the city of Chicago, the world, and themselves, through the eyes of more than 70 local artists whose work offers us ways to imagine a more equitable and interconnected world.

https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2020/The-Long-Dream

Sound piece by Farah Salem featured by ACRE Projects at the Artists Run Chicago 2.0 exhibition in Hyde Park Art Center.