Rania Matar's exhibition 50 Years Later – Where Do I Go? is on view at the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University through August 2, 2026, accompanied by a photobook of the same title. The project gathers approximately 128 color portraits of young women in Lebanon, framed around a question scrawled on a Beirut wall: Where do I go?

The work began after the Port of Beirut explosions in August 2020, when Matar saw young women working in the reconstruction, clearing debris. "From that moment, the idea of hope and rebirth became inseparable from the work," she says. She planned the project to mark the 50th anniversary of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–2025) — and then watched the question of her title return with new force, as a quarter of Lebanon's population is currently displaced.

Matar, who left Lebanon for the United States in 1984 at the same age as her subjects, describes the series as a return to her own crossroads. The women are also the ages of her daughters. "Had I stayed in Lebanon, my daughters might literally be them," she says.

Her method is collaborative. She finds participants through open calls on Instagram, never asks for photographs in advance, and plans each shoot with them by phone. Nothing is scouted or staged. Mirrors, shafts of light, flowers and architectural wounds recur across the images, holding, in her words, "devastation and resilience, between what has been lost and what is still possible" in a single frame.

Several of the women are now displaced themselves, some sheltering with families elsewhere in the country; others are raising funds, cooking meals and distributing food to those made homeless. "These images are my love letters to them," Matar says. "This project is for us all: the ones who stayed and the ones who have left but can never leave."