A blurry phone recording, a snippet from the militant cinema, a reenactment, or a track – cut and twisted and rearranged altogether – doesn’t so much dictate under what conditions historical events came to be, but rather attempts to insert the I or the you into the picture. The program starts with the re-enactment of Jamila Bouhired, an Algerian revolutionary hero, or a terrorist, depending on whose records you read, in Marwa Arsanio’s “Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila” that shifts the roles of historical responsibility. Meanwhile, Alaa Mansour’s feature film “Ainata” records a relatable scene of an elderly couple bickering on the balcony in Ainata, Lebanon ,,, about the way to approach the memory of their martyred son, a scene embedded within archival imagery of the dream that was once the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation) at the beginning of Lebanon’s civil war. Lastly, Oraib Toukan’s gentle images of the sea, the plants, a fun fair ,,, set alongside a breaking sound of an online call recalling the war on Gaza in 2021. What’s so startling about the montage of vision and sound in the “Offling” is not the atrocities under which Palestinian people lived, and continue to live, but rather, the transparency of the film to lend these images to our own being.
Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila
Marwa Arsanios, Lebanon, 2014, 25′
From the different representations of Jamila Bouhired, the Algerian freedom fighter, through the magazine›s Cairo’s Al-Hilal 50s and ‘60s collection, the performance attempts to look at the history of socialist projects in Egypt, anti-colonial wars in Algeria, and the way they have marginalized feminist projects. What does it mean to play a freedom fighter? to become an icon? How does the constitution of the subject serve certain political purposes?
Bio:
Artist, researcher, and filmmaker Marwa Arsanios was born in 1978 in Washington, D.C. She has been the subject of multiple solo exhibitions, including Notes for a Choreography, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal (2015); Hammer Projects: Marwa Arsanios, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Marwa Arsanios: A Letter Inside a Letter, Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati, OH (2021); and Marwa Arsanios: Matter of Alliances, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany (2023). She has also participated in many group exhibitions, including No Soul For Sale, Tate Modern, London, UK (2010); Here and Elsewhere, The New Museum, New York, NY (2014); Temporal, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2019); and All That We Have in Common, Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Macedonia (2021). Arsanios currently lives and works between Berlin, Germany and Beirut, Lebanon.
Aïnata
Alaa Mansour, Lebanon, 2018, 63′
Maybe that place doesn’t even exist. Maybe it only exists in an imaginary film that remains unresolved. At first, there is a withering memory. There is a desire to form a landscape in ruins. Scattered memory, scattered dream, my journey starts upon a loss that arises from the tremor of fantasy. Here we are in Aïnata in south Lebanon, a place where the Eye follows the stream to it source, where the tales from the land of Ugarit intertwine with our modern rituals and myths. I try to define a point of view, to recast the whole from a detail, to map out one’s own space. History is to be told, and its stories unfold into a territory, where the archeology of times owes its survival to fiction.
Bio:
Born in Kinshasa in 1989, Alaa Mansour is a Lebanese research-based artist and filmmaker, currently working between Paris and Beirut. Her debut documentary film Aïnata (2018), shot in south Lebanon, is a seminal work nurturing her interest in archives. After graduating with a Masters in Arts & Creation – Filmmaking (Paris 8), she started assisting for several years the filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, taking part in the production and coordination of various cultural and artistic projects such as the Cultural Resistance International Film Festival founded in Lebanon in 2013, as well as the book Zones de Guerre (éd. de l’Oeil) published in 2018. Calling upon a speculative archeology, her work questions the power of images and their relation to History, exploring the construction of individual narratives in the midst of collective socio-political mythologies.
The Offing
Oraib Toukan, Occupied Palestinian Territory, 2022, 22′
What narratives escape the frame of war, and how do those bearing witness, in turn, consume media? Offing, re-focuses the lens on the tender and the mundane as acts of life, and re-centers relationality as a way into the unrenderable essence of sound and subjectivity. Employing the spoken online voice of artist Salman Nawati, against footage shot by Oraib Toukan outside of Gaza, the film departs from the summer 2021 war on Gaza.
Bio:
Oraib Toukan is an artist and scholar. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Oxford University, Ruskin School of Art. Until Fall 2015, she was head of the Arts Division and Media Studies program at Bard College at Al Quds University, Palestine and was visiting faculty at the International Academy of Fine Arts in Ramallah. Between 2015 and 2017, she taught at the Ruskin School of Art’s University of Oxford Graduate Teaching program. In Autumn 2018, she was Mercator fellow at the Cultures of Critique program at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. Toukan is author of Sundry Modernism: Materials for a Study of Palestinian Modernism (Sternberg Press, 2017), and the essay-film When Things Occur (2016). Recent exhibitions include the Asia Pacific Triennial, the Mori Art Museum, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Qalandia International, The Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, and the 11th Istanbul Biennale. Toukan’s current research addresses “cruel images” and the question of how to treat them as both object and subject through artistic practice. Her writings have appeared in a number of publications, collected works, and biennale readers. Since 2011, she has been analyzing and remaking works from a found collection of film reels that once belonged to now-dissolved Soviet cultural centers in Jordan in 1990-1991. In the academic year 2019/20, she was a EUME Fellow and stayed at EUME during the academic years 2020-2022, supported by a fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation. In the academic years 2022-24, she continues to be affiliated with EUME.