AIPAD Talks | Myriam Boulos: What’s Ours

Join AIPAD Talks and Aperture for an online public program to celebrate the spring issue of Aperture magazine, “Celebrations,” which considers ceremonies, festivities‚ and how close observation can honor everyday life.

Myriam Boulos will be in conversation with the acclaimed writer Mona Eltahawy, author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) and founder of the newsletter Feminist Giant.

Based in Beirut, Myriam Boulos, now a Magnum nominee, has created a searing, diaristic body of work portraying her friends, family, and her city’s society with startling energy and intimacy. Her series, “What’s Ours,” featured in Aperture magazine’s spring issue titled “Celebrations” casts an unflinching eye on the revolution that began in Lebanon in 2019, with protests against corruption and government austerity, as well as the aftermath of the devastating port explosion in August 2020. Of her approach to photography, Boulos states: “It’s more of a need than a choice. I obsess about things and I don’t know how to deal with these obsessions in any other way but photography.”

Myriam Boulos was born in 1992 in Lebanon. At the age of sixteen she started to use her camera to question Beirut, its people, and her place among them. She graduated with a master’s degree in photography from Alba in 2015. Myriam took part in both national and international collective exhibitions, including Infinite identities (Amsterdam), 3ème biennale des photographes du monde arabe (Paris), and C’est Beyrouth (Paris). Today she uses photography to explore, defy, and resist society. In 2021 she was awarded the Grand prix ISEM and she joined Magnum.

Mona Eltahawy is the founder and editor-in-chief of the newsletter Feminist Giant. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2105) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second, The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019), took her disruption worldwide. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world.

Image: Myriam Boulos, Untitled, Beirut, Lebanon, November 2017–August 2020; Courtesy the artist