Ibi Ibrahim is a visual artist, writer, filmmaker and musician. His work is often inspired by his immediate surroundings, with an artistic practice that has steadily evolved to reflect his personal experiences and life stages over the past decade. His early work touches upon issues of sexuality, gender and tradition across the Middle East, including in his native Yemen. As the war erupted in Yemen and the Trump administration instituted the travel ban, Ibrahim’s practice evolved and placed the notion of home into question. What is home? What does it mean to be dispossessed of one? In his work, Ibrahim explores those questions through ongoing interviews and conversations with individuals experiencing the effects of the travel ban and the ongoing war in their homeland. In this body of work, Ibrahim is interested in people occupying the liminal space between homeland and al-gharb — the outer world.
His work is part of a number of public collections including the British Museum, Colorado College, Barjeel Art Foundation and Durham University Museum. He has been part of numerous art residencies including the Arab American National Museum (Dearborn), Soma Art Space (Berlin), Beirut Art Residency (Beirut), Cites Internationale des Arts (Paris) and others.
In 2018, Ibrahim founded Romooz Foundation; an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to support emerging Art and Literature in Yemen.
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