Seven pieces from her series, Evidence, by Diana Matar and their accompanying texts have been acquired by the Imperial War Musuem London with the help of the Contemporary Art Society.
Matar’s Evidence series responds to atrocities committed between 1977 and 2011. Landscapes and architectural spaces are presented where human rights violations took place during both the Gaddafi dictatorship and the ensuing Libyan civil war. Here the images stand in as ‘evidence because the acts of violence have gone undocumented or covered up by the regime’. Matar has described Evidence - ‘a response to the enforced disappearance of my father-in-law, a Libyan opposition leader who was taken by the Gaddafi regime in 1990’. Her work is a comment not only on the effects of dictatorship on a nation, but equally on the families and communities left behind.
The Imperial War Museum has over 11 million photographs covering the cause, course and consequences of modern-day conflicts, and so Diana Matar’s photography will serve to enrich this collection.
