Diana Matar, Evidence 1, 2012.
Book tickets
Continuing their exploration of the medieval legal concept of ‘habeas corpus’ and its demand to ‘produce the body’, the next event in Visible Justice’s year-long residency brings together Diana Matar and Hisham Matar to discuss how their work reflects the rhythms of their life. From exile and displacement to friendship and love, they will consider what emerges in the space between text and image.
For thirty years, conversations between photographic artist Diana Matar and writer Hisham Matar have circled around questions of justice; of the human body in flight. In their individual works, they have confronted political disappearance, state sponsored murder, the erosion of democracy, the psyche in the landscape, yet each time, their respective modes of address confer a state close to grace, and of acute attention.
Diana will intersperse spoken texts with a curated selection of projected images from three bodies of photographic work, Evidence, My America, and Tête à Tête. Hisham will read from across his works, including The Return and My Friends.
This event is part of Visible Justice's ongoing residency, which examines shifting conceptions and sites of justice through urgent conversations around censorship, proscription, abolition, occupation, displacement, and gendered violence. Building on themes developed throughout the residency, the programme asks what it means to bear witness, how more embodied forms of justice might be imagined, and for whom the body is made visible or rendered legible.
For thirty years, conversations between photographic artist Diana Matar and writer Hisham Matar have circled around questions of justice; of the human body in flight. In their individual works, they have confronted political disappearance, state sponsored murder, the erosion of democracy, the psyche in the landscape, yet each time, their respective modes of address confer a state close to grace, and of acute attention.
Diana will intersperse spoken texts with a curated selection of projected images from three bodies of photographic work, Evidence, My America, and Tête à Tête. Hisham will read from across his works, including The Return and My Friends.
This event is part of Visible Justice's ongoing residency, which examines shifting conceptions and sites of justice through urgent conversations around censorship, proscription, abolition, occupation, displacement, and gendered violence. Building on themes developed throughout the residency, the programme asks what it means to bear witness, how more embodied forms of justice might be imagined, and for whom the body is made visible or rendered legible.
Bios
Diana Matar is an American photographic artist based in London and New York. She grew up among the orchards, rolling hills and old-growth forests of Northern California, where the distinctive landscapes and light shaped how she learned to see. Matar often works for years on a photographic project, incorporating text and archival materials to investigate the relationship between the visible world and the histories it conceals, and to ask how aesthetics might reveal and critique systems of power inscribed onto landscapes, bodies and societies. She is the author of two acclaimed monographs, Evidence (2014) and My America (2024). Her photographs have been exhibited in over thirty international institutions and are held in major public collections. Matar is the recipient of a Ford Foundation Grant, the Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award for Fine Art, and two Arts Council England Grants. She is Professor of Professional Practice at Barnard College, Columbia University, and is represented by Purdy Hicks Gallery, London.
Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is also the author of In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Anatomy of a Disappearance and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and a finalist for both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.
Book tickets
Thu, 19 Nov 2026
Upper Gallery
06:30 pm
Ticket information
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Upper Gallery
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