Safi Alia Shabaik’s photographic series, Personality Crash: Portraits of My Father Who Suffered from Advanced Stages of Parkinson’s Disease, Dementia, and Sundowner’s Syndrome opens February 18th at Open Mind Art Space in Los Angeles.
It’s a compelling and intimately collaborative body of work that explores the human condition in a series of intense, beautiful black and white images. Shabaik describes her work as being about identity and the humanity of all people, but this visual story is a deeply personal one.
What began as a series on her father’s immigration from Egypt and life as an educator became instead images based around his survival with Parkinson’s. They decided to embark on the project together, knowing it could help not just themselves as they struggled to cope with this situation, but could help others as well.
The Los Angeles-based Shabaik reveals the difficulty of her father’s struggle and the growing constraints of deterioration in his mind and body. The images are filled with compassion and love, as well as a collaborative exploration of his disease, and his loss of health both physically and mentally.
Throughout the collaboration, she reveals that she gained new understanding about the disease itself and mental illness; viewing the ongoing project her father hoped most of all that others could learn from his experience, a hope that Shabaik herself is honoring.
Presented in Partnership with the Parkinson’s Foundation and made possible with a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, along with the exhibition of these powerful photographs, an afternoon of special programming will take place February 25th, Personality Crash: The Intersection of Art and Science in Parkinson’s Disease. Along with a presentation by the artist, there will also be a moderated conversation covering topics such as Parkinson’s and Creativity, Family Caregiving, Patient Advocacy, End-of-Life Care, and Dying with Dignity.
Serving both as caregiver and confidante to her father created profound artistic work. The images in this exhibition focus on the last year of her father’s life, on a journey she began documenting in 2014. The title comes from her father himself, who remained intensely aware of what was happening to him, and even used the phrase “personality crashes” to his daughter, providing the title for their collaboration.
Shabaik says that she is honored to partner with the Parkinson’s Foundation on this exhibition, and knows that her father would be “proud to know that his struggle with the disease will now become something life-affirming.”
The artist discovered art and photography itself at a young age, and has worked as a photographic documentarian, a fashion stylist, has work in performer Grace Jones’ book I’ll Never Write my Memoirs, as well as in Artillery, CameraCraft, and on Upworthy.com. An interdisciplinary artist, her work continues to focus on identity and transformation as well as daily life, and the humanity of all. She’s worked in photography, mixed-media collage, assemblage, printmaking, sculpture, and experimental video, has exhibited nationally, and and has been featured in publications including The New York Times, Black+White Photography, Lenscratch, Alta Journal, Catalyst: Interviews, CameraCraft and The Advocate, as well.
The exhibition opening takes place February 18 from 3-8 p.m.; the special programming presentation on the 25th will be live-streamed as a webinar starting at 1 p.m., with the gallery open to the public from 4-7:30 that evening for a meet and greet with the artist. The exhibition runs until March 4th. Registration for the event on the 25th is required; to do so, visit Parkinson.org/ArtandScience or call (312) 786-4653.
- Genie Davis; photography provided by the artist