Evidence and The Return 

Join writer Hisham Matar, photographer Diana Matar and British Museum Director Hartwig Fischer in conversation with lawyer and writer Professor Philippe Sands as they discuss the themes highlighted by the current display, Evidence and The Return: an intervention by Diana Matar and Hisham Matar. Introduced by curator Venetia Porter.
The talk accompanies this free display, in which Diana Matar and Hisham Matar express, in different ways, the disappearance and search for Hisham’s father Jaballa Matar, a political opposition leader during the Qaddafi era in Libya. He was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990 and is still missing. Through objects from the British Museum collection, interspersed with personal objects of their own, they weave narratives that are personal while also offering perspectives on contemporary Libya and wider themes of remembrance.
For the display, Hisham Matar chose objects including fragile terracotta heads, from the third-century site of Cyrene, Libya, a place he visited as a boy with his father. They are interspersed with a diary, his father’s identity card, images of Hisham as a teenager and delicate abstract drawings he made while writing his acclaimed memoir The Return. Diana's artist book Evidence is a meditation on absence told through photographs and diary entries written by the artist to her missing father-in-law. Documenting the search for Jaballa over several years, the work reveals the effects of political violence on a family and a nation. Displayed alongside are page layouts from her book, sketchbooks, diaries, and photographic proofs she made while working in Libya. These are complemented by coins minted by Libyan troops in revolt against Carthage in the third century BC.
Evidence and The Return: an intervention by Diana Matar and Hisham Matar is in the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World (Room 43) until 3 July 2022.
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Image credit: Diana Matar, Evidence, Artist Book, Edition Number 9/10, 2014. Funded by CaMMEA