Sham Enbashi (b. 1988) is a Syrian photographer and architect who grew up in Dubai and now lives in Amsterdam. Graduated with Bachelors of Architecture and Design at the American University of Sharjah 2012, she worked as a full time architect in various firms for the following 8 years, the most recent is Studio PietBoon in Amsterdam. She was a fellow in 2016 at the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF) in AbuDhabi in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design.

Sham’s attitude towards her photography practice involves observation, reflection and re-staging of her findings. She works with the medium of photography to question the relation between our objective and subjective reality; the relationship between the world out there and our internal experience of it. She achieves that through internal introspection, contemplation, conversations and drawing from her own personal encounters. Through her works, Sham tries to bring out the most personal sides of who we are and to shed light and document the internal transformations of a being within the context of his/her immediate social interactions.

In her project “And I Think We Should Meet" , Sham questions whether love is an encounter of chance or determined will. In a search for “the one,” during a trip across 11 European cities, Sham photographed men at their homes whom she was romantically drawn towards. The photos were taken within 24 hours of meeting them. Although Sham’s personal life has guided her projects, she is simultaneously trying to confirm the universality of the human condition. Her recent research is migrating towards self observation and understanding stemming from the desire that nothing worth doing is going to be done if it doesn’t come from knowing who we are. The beginnings of these studies are reflected in her most recent ongoing project "Man As An Unfinished World", in which she uses her experiences with psychedelic medicines during the past 4 years to reflect and understand her personal relationship with death, fear and the experience of loneliness.

Besides research and execution, representation methods of the project is a highlight of her process. Recently, her photos are intertwined with documented texts of either her journals or from literary material that influenced her photos or that she was consuming during the realisation of the project.