Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deep Sleep draws from historical avant-garde cinema to produce a poetic, sound-based meditation following brainwave-generating binaural beats. The dreamlike video is filmed among abandoned ruins in Malta, Athens, and Gaza, connecting the three locations in an attempt to convey the experience of being in Gaza from these monumental sites. Colorful flickering lights, sun, earth, stone, rock, sky, and water inundate the scenes, and the rhythmic sounds of waves, chimes, and footsteps remain.

Installation (Installation)

Tughra is a protocol by Sharif Waked that reproduces the sixteenth century calligraphic monogram for tughra ; also known as the signature of Suleiman the Magnificent. Under Suleiman’s reign, at the beginning of the 16th century, the Ottoman empire achieved its apex both in terms of territorial extension and cultural creation. Suleiman personally instituted major judicial changes relating to society, education, taxation, and criminal law, as such he is often referred to as ‘The Lawgiver’.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Bath Time by Sharif Waked is a short video based on the tragi-comic outcome of the Israeli Blockade and the wars in Gaza. The story tells about how, after a war and the ongoing economic pressure, the Gaza Zoo lost several of their animals, and decided that they could paint a donkey so that it could pose as a zebra. The video imagines the donkey in the shower after a shift impersonating a zebra at the Gaza Zoo, as the hot water slowly washes its faux stripes away.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Um Al Dhabaab (Mother of Fog) by Farah Al Qasimi addresses the myth of Al Qasimi tribe-instigated piracy in the Gulf, perpetuated by the British Empire and upheld by contemporary western academia. This narrative is contested through a fictional retelling of the 1819 siege of Al Dhayah fort and the subsequent Pax Britannica treaty that solidified Britain’s military presence in the Trucial States. Relayed across various locations and times in Ras Al Khaimah through the perspectives of an ancient jinn, the ghost of an Al Qasimi pirate, two RAK-based sisters, a Jack Sparrow impersonator and ship captain, and an 1819 British naval officer, the film challenges Western-centric historiographies of the Gulf and the lingering imperialist interests at play across Asia’s modern-day trade hubs.

Photography (Photography)

Farah Al Qasimi’s approach to photography deviates from the norms and conventions of traditional figurative and portrait photography. It’s Not Easy Being Seen 2 is from a series of photographs depicting women who are otherwise unnoticed by the public. In this work, her subject is obscured by a bright, green fabric (also referred to as a morph suit) that uses the concept of green screen technology to conceal identity.

Textile (Textile)

In 2011, Mounira Al Solh began a series of drawings that documented her meetings and conversations with displaced Syrian refugees in Lebanon and various European countries. The oral histories she collected are very different from those told in administrative interviews or police interviews. My specialty was to make a peasants’ haircut, but they obliged me work till midnight often (2017) is part of a series of embroideries that speaks to how personal stories in this political context create collective history.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Her work Al final del arcoiris (At the end of the rainbow, 2015) is a bundle of bills from Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, arranged by color to form a tight spiraling rainbow held close with a rubber band. Here, Martinez uses these various currencies to gesture towards questions of capital and value, the accumulation of wealth, and regional economies. Beneath the surface of her playful visual propositions, Martinez asks us to consider not only the monetary costs of international goods, but also the real, human consequences of a global economic culture that privileges some and devastates others.

Photography (Photography)

Borrowed Faces is a photo novel published in 2019. These framed colour photographs are selected scenes from the novel. They mimic the aesthetic of a dated comic strip but instead contain vibrantly coloured, digital photos; here the ‘live’ element of the photographic medium meets the theatrics of the graphic novel.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Great Game is a series of works composed of a number of card combinations illustrated by the faces of key political figures shaping the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East. Each reconstituted ‘hand of play’ corresponds to a diplomatic treaty establishing or modifying geographical borders. The plastic form of a poker hand chosen by the artist highlights the randomness of the process of fixing boundaries and the way in which they do not account for the lives of those located there.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Pixelated Revolution is a lecture-performance by artist Rabih Mroué about the use of mobile phones during the Syrian revolution. The lecture looks at the central role that the photographs taken with these devices played in informing and mobilizing people during the revolutionary events, due to their ability to be shared and spread through virtual and viral communication platforms.

Photography (Photography)

“Films inspired people a lot. they came to perform kissing in front of a camera. In a conservative society such as Saida, people were willing to play the kiss between two people of the same sex, but very rarely between a man and a woman.

Photography (Photography)

“While taking the picture it was challenging to make the boys sit properly without moving. Sometimes a member of the family whould hide behind, holding the child.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Photography (Photography)

“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls. They invented the poses, the gestures and situations.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Photography (Photography)

Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948. Like all studio photographers his subjects came to him. The studio was a constant flux of visitors.

Photography (Photography)

“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls. They invented the poses, the gestures and situations.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Photography (Photography)

“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls. They invented the poses, the gestures and situations.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Throughout his career, Marwan Rechmaoui has maintained a drawing practice. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns the artist spent his evenings recording thoughts and imagery on paper, inspired by events happening around him, music, his garden, and the news. These drawings are contemporaneous in their concerns and are indexical of a destitute time and space in the aesthetics they conjure.

Photography (Photography)

“When you position your hand on someone’s shoulder, your shoulders become straight and horizontal. Placing one’s hand on a stable surface helps position the shoulders and the general posture of the body.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Photography (Photography)

“Other photographers used to send me negatives of cross-eyed people, asking me to retouch them. I used to scratch out the emulsion where the pupil is, and draw another one right next to it.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Photography (Photography)

“These are negatives that were scratched because of a jealous husband from the Baqari family, who never let his wife out by herself. He was upset to know that she came to be photographed in my studio without telling him. He came asking for the negatives.

Photography (Photography)

“In the 1980s I started using coloured paper backdrops, one of which was yellow. You can see they never reached the floor. I used them for colour and black-and-white photography.” Hashem El Madani.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The End of Time

Photography (Photography)

“The two men were relatives and both were in the Lebanese Army.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948. Like all studio photographers his subjects came to him.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Throughout his career, Marwan Rechmaoui has maintained a drawing practice. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns the artist spent his evenings recording thoughts and imagery on paper, inspired by events happening around him, music, his garden, and the news. These drawings are contemporaneous in their concerns and are indexical of a destitute time and space in the aesthetics they conjure.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Katia Kameli’s film The Storyteller explores the cultural role of deep-rooted artistic tradition in Morocco. Marrakech’s largest public square is well known for its al-halqa , a storyteller’s circle or circle of spectators. Abderrahim Al Azalia is a hlaïqya; it is his role to animate the al-halqa.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Immolation I is taken from the four-part Immolation series which shows four Arab revolutionaries who publicly sacrificed themselves through self-immolation and in so doing heralded the beginning of the Arab Spring. The lugubrious drawings are made with cigarette burns, a direct reference to torture and burning stakes, even if what is depicted here can be considered the ultimate act of resistance in the form of self-destruction. The portraits were meticulously executed on large-scale fragile sheets of paper.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Baudelaire’s latest film, Also known as Jihadi (2017) tells the story of a young French boy from Parisian suburbs and his assumed journey to the Al-Nusra front in Syria to join ISIS and fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Employing the cinematographic approach known as ‘landscape theory’ — or fûkeiron — developed out of Marxist film criticism in the 1970s where the landscape of a film is read as an expression of the political climate, thus becoming a significant character, motivation or reasoning for the films development. The 101-minute follows Abdel Aziz from the socially and politically rife milieu of the Parisian suburbs, weighted by division, segregation, development and poverty to, what the viewer assumes, Syria.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

During her research on primitive currencies and cultural cannibalism, Cuevas came across the Donald Duck comic book issue “The Stone Money Mystery,” where Donald goes on a quest to find missing museum objects. Cuevas’s America (2006) is a wall painting of a comic Donald Duck wallowing in a heap of gold coins, alluding to Mexico’s postrevolutionary mural tradition. The mural’s background is one of the earliest illustrations of flora and fauna in the American continent, juxtaposed with a reference to America as having bountiful natural resources available to be exploited, and the historical use of comics as ideological tools.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

geopoliticalThe Great Game is a series of works composed of a number of card combinations illustrated by the faces of key political figures shaping the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East. Each reconstituted ‘hand of play’ corresponds to a diplomatic treaty establishing or modifying geographical borders. The plastic form of a poker hand chosen by the artist highlights the randomness of the process of fixing boundaries and the way in which they do not account for the lives of those located there.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Three men with their backs to each other, dressed similarly in dark colors, stare straight at the camera. They individually deliver sacred lines from the Torah, New Testament, and Qur’an in their representative languages: Old Hebrew, Greek, and Old Arabic. As the camera slowly rotates around the trio, the men begin to perform traditional manifestations of each religious cult: Torah Cantillations, Gregorian Chants, and tilawat of Al-Qur’an.