Like Sugar in Ashes
Digital archival print, 100 cm x 70 cm (39 in x 28 in), 2024
Inspired by the title, Cakemakers from Maroun Tomb’s lost 1947 painting, Alshaibi imagined a moment of joy in historical Palestine— the artist observing bakers as they craft layered confections, creating sweetness out of labor and ritual. This work also alludes to a recent project of Alshaibi where she carried stacked vessels atop her head, a form of physical labor and endurance.
Then the present interrupts that image. As the buildings in Gaza fall, each floor crushes the one below it: the layered cakes transformed into pancaked ruins. Buildings become grave markers and the tiered beauty once envisioned can no longer be separated from grief. Even the most ordinary rituals — a birthday, a candle— now register as sites of mourning. Celebration and grief have become inseparable.
Yet, life continues to assert itself. Alshaibi refers to a story that she read that has stayed with her about a baker in Gaza who fulfilled a request for a birthday cake amidst the bombings, and then another, and another. A birthday cake in wartime is not simply a gesture of resilience. It is a refusal to surrender our humanity.
Like Sugar in Ashes sits in that tension: between the sweetness of what was and the ashes of what remains — held by Alshaibi’s son, who carries the cake in quiet tribute to the words of Abu Hani, the cakemaker: “We Gazans love life. People are pushing themselves to hope.”
Sama Alshaibi is a Palestinian-Iraqi artist whose work incorporates photography, video and installation. Her practice explores the notion of aftermath—the fragmentation and dispossession that violates the individual and community following the destruction of the social, natural and built environment. Alshaibi is a Guggenheim Fellow and a 2023 Art Matters Betty Parsons Fellow. Her exhibitions include the 55th Venice Biennale, the 2020 State of the Art (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), among others. Alshaibi is based in the United States, where she is a Regents Professor of Art at the University of Arizona in Tucson.