Graceful Ghosts: Across Two Decades, Rania Matar Photographs Lebanon Through War and Displacement

Lebanese-born Palestinian American photographer Rania Matar has always tuned her lens to the intimate psychological details of her subjects. In “Where Do I Go? لوين روح,” Matar expands her scope, tracing the thread of national history through the lives of roughly twenty women photographed between 2020 and 2025. In its hybrid concern of historical and personal narrative, the exhibition is as much a deep reflection on the fifty-year legacy of the Lebanese Civil War and its parallels to the current Israeli-Lebanese conflict as it is a retrospective of Matar’s maturation as an artist and person. 

It seems fitting that such an exhibition be held at Robert Klein Gallery x Sea-Dar’s The Project Space. The result of two powerhouse names in their respective fields of photography and construction, the space occupies half of a wide, refurbished warehouse-turned-office building sitting liminally between the edge of the South End and I-93. Trained as an architect before she found photography, Matar possesses an exquisite sensitivity to environment and composition. She encourages from viewers a kind of wandering, nonlinear construction of narrative, with each wide-walled section of the gallery vaguely clustered around time period, tone, or landmark.

A few of Matar’s large digital prints hang on the wall at the mouth of the gallery entrance, separated from the rest of the show. One of these, hung opposite the exhibition wall text, shows Fawzia, a woman wearing a beige dress and a white, unraveling hijab, hanging her head over poles that bisect a bus stop. Because a metal pole in the foreground hides her neck, her body appears literally split between the two opposite-pointing signs—one to Beirut, the other to Choueifat—as if by guillotine. The roadside moment is caught up in a myriad of ambiguities, where she seems at rest but perhaps out of exhaustion, where the apricot dusklight sweetens the bleakness of the bus stop. This photograph, down to its spatial arrangement, is a microcosm for the exhibit as a whole: a dreamlike vista conjured to express the complex emotional hues of displacement.

The Lebanese Civil War, which began roughly in 1975 and continued until 1990, is both central to and visibly absent from the work. Its presence is summoned always at slant: in bullet holes on abandoned, collapsing buildings, in wind yawning through the window of a blown-open wall. Once called the “Paris of the Middle East,” Beirut was a popular metropolitan destination for tourists from the 1950s to 1970s. Investing in its foreign appeal, the country built various hotels, such as the Aley Grand Hotel, the Holiday Inn, Long Beach Club, and modernist arts spaces, including The Egg cinema building and Piccadilly Theatre, with every intention of expanding its bustling downtown sectors. But with the outbreak of the war, many of the places that promised a future, or at the very least the implication of progress, were razed to the ground. Matar herself watched as a child while the Holiday Inn Beirut was shelled until it was engulfed in flames. For years the building stood as a blackened carcass, a monument to what could have been.

Like glamorous apparitions, Matar’s subjects float through these sites symbolic of Beirut’s pre-war abundance in fine, richly colored silks. In Lara H. (Bullet Holes), Abandoned Zahle Cinema, Zahle, Lebanon (2024), the silhouette of a woman stands in a brightly illuminated window; she presses her hand against the glass which separates her from a darkened room where bullet holes in a door create a constellation of speckled light across the floor. Shadows and light, presence and absence are inverted such that the emptiness of the photo becomes its incontestable fullness. In Tamara (with a Camera Obscura Reflection of Burj El Murr Tower), Beirut, Lebanon (2025) the subject’s back is turned to the camera, most of her body veiled in shadow save for the bright, formidable image of Burj El Murr Tower running along the curvature of her spine. The forty-story tower was another monument claimed by the war, eventually becoming a snipers’ nest because it stood along what was then the Green Line—the no man’s land that separated East and West Beirut during the Civil War. Tamara could see the tower from her apartment window, the same apartment where Matar, a year ago, constructed a camera obscura to depict its threatening presence imprinting itself on her like a tattoo. Though the women photographed in the collection did not live through the war, they nonetheless live with it.

Rather than opt for a realist documentation of the demolition for the consumption of Western audiences, Matar reanimates the buildings with a surreal, hauntological mode. Coined by French deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida, hauntology (hantologie)—a portmanteau of “haunting” and “ontology”—appeared in his 1993 book, Specters of Marx. Hauntology was originally introduced as a counter to Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 claim that the collapse of the Soviet Union signalled the end of ideological evolution and that either the domination of Western liberal democracy or takeover of global capitalism were inevitable.¹ For Derrida, hauntology was a concept that could make visible the virtuality of the past and future in the present. Though absent in that the past has occurred and the future is a latent potentiality, both forces continue to affect, indeed construct, the present like spooky action at a distance. In Derrida’s case it meant that the specter of Marxism, despite its actual political failure, still disrupts the present with its penumbral presence-in-absence, its beguiling ideological promise to the unsolved problems of a dominating capitalist system. In Matar’s photographs, the very land is haunted by promised futures that never arrived, by the unlearned lessons of the past doomed to recur.

This hauntological mode allows Matar to communicate the fragmentation of Lebanon’s national identity and the disrupted lives of her subjects. Toward the back of the exhibition, Matar introduces three pearls of wisdom from Etel Adnan, the famous Lebanese writer and painter, whose quotes are printed along the gallery walls. One wall bears a quote from In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), where Adnan compares herself to the land: “I am both an American and an Arab and these identities are sometimes at odd with each other, not every day, not even often, but once in a great while I become a mountain that some terrifying earthquake has split.”² Another quote from her collection of letters, Of Cities & Women, describes how in post-war Lebanon, “The women have kept contact with the earth … in the ancient roles of witnesses and memory keepers.”3 Adnan’s intertextual frame illuminates the personal-national condition Matar captures with her lens.

But what is still missing in this description, which shines like a brilliant north star in the exhibition, is the word imaginaries. There is in the photographs, as Adnan herself felt, an awkward split between the subjects and the spaces they inhabit, a disjointedness of time. Yet it is also true that the landscape and the portrait are inseparable in this exhibition; the landmarks of Beirut’s and Matar’s subjects are mutually constitutive, expressive of one another. These women become vessels for multivalent communication, reflecting the stories of the land, of their own individual struggles, the struggles of a nation, even the artist’s own personal struggles. They pose as Venus; they veil their faces with hair and flowers; they stand and stare; they lay and drape and measure their reflections; they billow in the wind and wash ashore and dance with ghosts. Matar explains in her project statement that these comportments arise from an organic process of collaborative embodiment, where she allows her subjects to become active participants in the creation of the image, following their impulses about how to move through their environments. Despite the fact that most of Matar’s subjects never experienced the war firsthand, she invites them to imagine alongside her, creating, in essence, a dimension that straddles the line between reality and artifice, past and present. This hybrid method of staged composition and intuitive spontaneity is precisely what animates the images with an uncanny beauty. It is a more recent development in Matar’s practice, one that has taken shape in the past six years.

Proof of this change comes along the back edges of the exhibition, where selected works from Matar’s earlier series sit alongside this most recent one, themselves haunting the recent body of work with past styles since evolved. One sees the candid spontaneity and documentary efforts of an earlier project, the striking black-and-white film series Ordinary Lives (2007–09). In her earliest works, Matar’s tact manifested itself in the dynamism and verve of her candids, often angular or motion-blurred. But staged composition has also been a practice in Matar’s work for many years now, notably since she switched to digital color photography and ventured into portraiture. Matar’s portraits are never decollated profiles; she captures her subjects’ spatial comportment, letting every gesture, every awkward sidelong glance, communicate the presence of who they are. Eventually Matar began more fully incorporating setting into the narrative of the portrait, as in the series A Girl and Her Room and On Either Side of the Window, where the line between interiority and exteriority was blurred. From these middle-period works, not on view in the exhibition, one senses the echoes between Matar’s own fraught experiences as a woman immigrant and those of the women whom she photographs. Her camera is nearly always self-reflexive. From her subjects she draws certain metaphysical conditions—adolescence, aging, grief, joy—that make of their concrete experiences something archetypal. What is remarkable about Matar’s earlier work is that she unveils the universal hidden plainly in the particular.

But “Where Do I Go?” is no longer a documentation of the real, or what simply is, as in Matar’s earlier works. Rather, it is a new, imaginative rediscovery and retelling of what could be, what could have been, what is not. This effect could only be achieved by Matar’s foray into the simulated; in that blurred line between the real and imagined, a portal opens for the ghosts of the past to possess the work. It is through the process of imagining that the is and is not are able to communicate. If the question of the exhibition is “Where Do I Go?,” Matar finds a way of choosing both and neither response at the same time. A sensitive, humanist photographer from her first collection, Matar’s photographic interests center on Lebanese and American experiences, using the specificity of individuals to create dynamic, multidimensional representations of identity. No doubt, growing up in Lebanon, where ethnic and religious heterogeneity has been both the founding principle and self-destructive impulse of its nationhood, imprinted on Matar the need to portray people and her home(s) as uniquely complex.

What Matar offers in this exhibition is not purely hauntological, not merely a sterile description of a cultural impasse. She effectually creates a new mythology alongside the women she photographs, whose dreams clash dramatically against the hard line of history and each other. Embodying the landscapes of Beirut in all manner of symbolic parallels, Matar’s subjects try to create a visual language for the flux and fragmentation of that identity. Angela stands as a sand-colored Doric column in the Temple of Bacchus in Baalbek. Tara melds with different flowers growing around the region. Lujain lays in an empty pool wearing a dress the color of water. Rhea wears a dress the same colors of the former bar or gambling room she stands in at the Aley Grand Hotel, which was once known as the “bride of the summers.” Aya stands next to a graffitied image of an eye in Gemmayze; her name echoes that of the building that watches her, and the viewer. Matar’s women, vaguely iconographic yet always individual, recast the landmarks of Beirut in a new light.

Adnan, one of the show’s Beirutian specters, said of beauty that “It’s more than shapes and color. It’s more than what you see. Your total inner world.”⁴ With “Where Do I Go?,” Matar succeeds in bringing to life a complex form of beauty that blends seen and unseen. Expanding on techniques present in her early works to a strikingly surreal effect, she captures the liminalities of displacement with grace. Matar has given us another reason to believe in the redemptive power of beauty.

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—1 Mark Fisher, “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly Vol. 66, No. 1 (Fall 2012), 16.
—2  Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (City Lights Publishers, 2005), 71.
—3 Etel Adnan, Of Cities & Women: Letters to Fawwaz (The Post-Apollo Press, 1993), 73.
—4  Van Gogh Museum Extra, “Etel Adnan – Colour as Language,” YouTube video, 7:27, May 18, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odzjLhDDKdc.

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“Rania Matar: Where Do I Go? لوين روح” is on view through October 3, 2026, at RKG x Sea-Dar, 580 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA.