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I N T E R N A T I O N A L C O N F E R E N C E

R E G I O N A L V I S - À - V I S G L O B A L D I S C O U R S E S : CONTEMPORARY ART FROM THE MIDDLE EAST F R I D A Y 5 A N D S A T U R D A Y 6 J U L Y 2 0 1 3

SCREENING PROGRAMME 5-6 July 2013 Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre Room B104, Brunei Building C U R A T E D B Y A Z A R M A H M O U D I A N I N C O L L A B O R A T I O N W I T H B A R B A D G O L S H I R I

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London Middle East Institute SOAS, University of London Russell Square, WC 0XG London www.soas.ac.uk/lmei/events/ Special Thanks: Louise Hosking (LMEI), Valentina Zanardi (LMEI), Alia Fattouh (Lombard Fried Gallery, NY), Karisa Morante (Francoise Ghebaly Gallery, LA), About Productions, Beirut

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S c r e e n i n g P r o g r a m m e

Friday 5 July 18.00-18.40 / Brunei Lecture Theatre Shadow Sites II: Aesthetics of Disappearance, 2010, 15 min Jannane Al-Ani Everywhere Was the Same, 2007, 11 min Basma Al Sharif Into Thin Air into the Ground, 2011, 31 min Haig Aivazian

12.00-13.00 / Room B 104 The Message, 2010, 185 min Fayçal Baghriche 15.00-15.30 / Room B 104 Repeat After Me, 2008, 1.34 min Shahab Fotouhi Sans titre (untitled), 2010, 14 min Neil Beloufa A Sketch of Manners (Alfred Roch's Last Masquerade), 2012, 8 min Jumana Manna My Father is Still a Communist: Intimate Secrets to be Published, 2011, 32 min Ahmad Ghossein

Saturday 6 July 18.15-19.00 / Brunei Lecture Theatre Repeat After Me, 2008, 1.34 min Shahab Fotouhi Sans titre (untitled), 2010, 14 min Neil Beloufa A Sketch of Manners (Alfred Roch's Last Masquerade), 2012, 8 min Jumana Manna My Father is Still a Communist: Intimate Secrets to be Published, 2011, 32 min Ahmad Ghossein 12.00-13.00 / Room B 104 The Lost Film, 2003, 47 min Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige 14.00-14.30 / Room B 104 Shadow Sites I: Aesthetics of Disappearance, 2010, 8 min Jannane Al-Ani Everywhere Was the Same, 2007, 11min Basma Al Sharif Into Thin Air into the Ground, 2011, 31 min Haig Aivazian

1 Jannane Al-Ani

Shadow Sites II: Aesthetics of Disappearance Iraq/Jordan| HD Video | 15 min | 2010

The Film Shot in the south of Jordan, Aesthetics of Disappearance explores the disappearance of the body in the real and imagined landscapes of the region. Al-Ani has a long-standing interest in the power of testimony and the documentary tradition, and in reversing the way in which the 19th-century Orientalist stereotype of the Middle Eastern landscape endures. The notion of exotic and unoccupied space continues to inform Western media representations of the Arab world. The 1991 Gulf War marked a significant moment in the history of visualizing the Middle East. Military technology produced long-distance cartographic images and transmitted them around the globe, sparking artistic responses to a war that seemed more virtual than real. Struck by these images, Al-Ani began to examine the relationship between photography and the enduring perception of the region as a blank canvas. Drawing on Paul Virilio’s writings in particular, Al-Ani developed “The Aesthetics of Disappearance”, an ongoing project of photography and video works, all set in the desert, that explore the absence of the human body. The film survey of southern Jordan narrates the history of the area, while documenting the ancient remains, abandoned sites, formal and informal routes of the south, as well as cattle farms and military locations, all of which shape Jordan today. Jananne Al-Ani (born 1966, lives and works in London) studied Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Art and graduated with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in 1997. Exhibiting widely, she has had solo shows at Tate Britain and the Imperial War Museum in London. Recent group exhibitions include Closer (Beirut Art Center), and Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking (MoMA, New York). Al-Ani has co-curated exhibitions including Veil and Fair Play. Selected filmography: A Loving Man (1996-1999), Muse (2004), and Flock and the Guide (2008).

2 Basma Al Sharif Everywhere Was the Same United States | Single Channel SD Video | 11 min |2007

The Film In an empty room, a slideshow projection of abandoned places plays alongside the narrative of two girls who find themselves on the shores of a pre-apocalyptic paradise. Factual texts drawn from the Madrid Peace Accords to the CIA World Factbook are woven into a fictional narrative that unfolds the story of a massacre. When the image and text malfunctions and the story is no longer comprehensible, the video wanders away from the room of the slideshow, allowing us to see what is happening elsewhere. Basma Al Sharif (Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents) has developed her practice nomadically since receiving an MFA in 2007 from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Living and working between Cairo, Beirut, Sharjah, Amman, Gaza and most recently, Paris, Basma’s work operates between cinema and installation. Her works have shown in solo exhibitions, bienniales and festivals including YIDFF, Videobrasi, and Manifesta 8. She was awarded a Jury Prize at the 9th Sharjah Biennial and won the Marion McMahon Award at the Images Festival in Toronto.

3 Haig Aivazian

Into Thin Air into the Ground 31 min|2011

The Film This piece is part of the project The Unimaginable Things We Build which is a multi-part project exploring the evolution of the rhetoric surrounding, and material state of, the tallest man-made structure in the world, Dubai's Burj Khalifa. The project focuses on several main stages of the skyscraper's life in order to bi-directionally put the material existence of the Burj into question. The work suggests that the tower, through its own incessant utterances, existed well before its inauguration and frames this inauguration as a public suicide. In order to reconcile notions of globalization and site-specificity, as well as the idea of monumental landmark architectures as nodes in an unrepresentable global network of immaterial capital, the project makes use of artistic and literary frameworks and discusses the Burj via the perspectives of Lawrence Weiner, Walter De Maria, Yves Klein and Sheherazade, among others. “Into Thin Air Into the Ground” retraces a brief history of the Burj Khalifa, starting from its conception stages, when it was considerably shorter, and was meant to be the Grollo Tower in Melbourne, Australia. Since then, the Burj has literally not been itself and has been having a difficult time grounding itself in Dubai, the city which it claims to represent. The film presents a Burj Khalifa that is suspended in an “uncanny purgatory”, a tower that never existed or whose early death has been covered up with a series of smokescreens.

Based on a Financial Times ad depicting an imaginary Manhattanesque skyline containing the Burj Khalifa, as well as many other iconic structures from around the globe, Into Thin Air Into the Ground argues that these collapsed imaginary non-spaces are the only instances where the Burj can potentially exist. But given that over-imaging is what contributes to the building’s inability to ground itself, it is therefore necessary to bury it in such a space.

Haig Aivazian is an artist, curator and writer currently based in Chicago. He has a BFA from Concordia University in Design and Studio Art, and an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. Aivazian's work has been investigating the intersections between the migration of peoples, the circulation of consumer goods and the propagation of ideologies. Aivazian has been involved in a number of curatorial initiatives such as Roads Were Open / Roads Were Closed (2008) at The Third Line gallery in Dubai, and most recently, he has been appointed Associate Curator of the 10th edition of the Sharjah Biennial (2011). He has shown his work in France, Canada, the UAE and the United States, and the first installment of his ongoing project entitled FUGERE (A Series of Olympiadic Events) was commissioned and exhibited in the 9th edition of the Sharjah Biennial (2009). Aivazian has written for a number of websites and publications including Bidoun, FUSE, AdBusters, AMCA and the Arab Studies Journal.

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Shahab Fotouhi Repeat After Me 1.34 min | 2008

The Film During a residency in Switzerland Shahab Fotouhi asked European citizens to sing an old Iranian lullaby; each person sang one line of the lyrics. When he finished the work, he informed them that it was in fact the first national anthem of the Islamic Republic that they had been singing. He then asked people if they still wanted to be involved in the final video or not. The black gaps within the work are the empty spaces born of people who eventually withdrew. Shahab Fotouhi (b. 1980, Yazd, Iran) currently lives and works in Tehran. He studied Fine Art at Städelschule, Frankfurt, 2008-2010. His recent shows include Establishing Shot; Interior, Night - Exterior, Day; without Antagonist and Extra, Azad Gallery, Tehran, (2013), 7th Taipei Biennial (2010), Home Works 5, Beirut (2010), 4th Auckland Triennial (2010), 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009) and By the Horses Who Run Panting, Azad Gallery, Tehran (2009). His videos have been shown in The Uncertainty Principle, MACBA, Barcelona (2009) and New Voices, Barbican Centre, London (2008).

5 Neil Beloufa

Sans titre (Untitled) Algeria/France|14 min | 2010

The Film A cardboard decor and photographs reconstitute a luxury Californian-type villa in Algeria. Its inhabitants, neighbours and other protagonists imagine themselves there to explain why and how the latter was occupied by terrorists in order to hide although it is, paradoxically, made entirely of glass. They even polished it clean so as to leave no traces. This improbable and irresolvable anecdote encourages the characters to invent images of an event given media coverage without the images or the story and thus missing the main point. Beloufa restages the scene of the terrorist invasion based on an array of hypotheses about the mysterious yet infamous event in question. He reconstitutes the villa from cardboard and photographs depicting the villa’s surroundings, and directs actors who turn their backs on the camera, staring off into the trompe-l’œil landscape. Thus, Beloufa makes an anti-realist documentary about an unseen incident. In his retelling, the terrorists have left nothing in their wake besides a broken table and some ashes.

With Untitled Beloufa equates the loss of information to the deterioration of a house made of paper and pieces together a story of so many looks that were never exchanged—between the terrorists and the witnesses, between the witnesses and the actors, and, finally, between the actors and the camera. The film’s precarious construction echoes both the fragmented nature of this work of re-enactment and the fragility of witness accounts. Beloufa’s installation multiplies points of view, presenting the film for spectators’ viewing while also putting the spectators on display as they make their way through his microcosmic theatre of transactions.

Neil Beloufa (b. 1985, lives in Paris) studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris, and is currently a member of the 2010 promotion of Le Fresnoy – National Studio for Contemporary Arts. He has received several awards, notably the Prix Videoforme of Clermont Ferrand 2009, the Grand Prix IndieLisboa 2009 and the ARTE prize for a European Short Film at the 54th Oberhausen Film Festival. His work has been shown in four solo exhibitions in Frankfurt, Los Angeles, Paris and New York, and selected for several group exhibitions and projects since 2007 (12th Biennial of Moving Images in Geneva, Prague International Triennial, Momenta Art Brooklyn, the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam, Espace Croisé in Roubaix, Beaux Arts of Marseille). Sans titre was awarded the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 2011.

6 Jumana Manna A Sketch of Manners (Alfred Roch's Last Masquerade) HD Video | 8 min |2012

The Film Alfred Roch, member of the Palestinian National League, is a politician with a bohemian panache. In 1942, at the height of WWII, he throws what will turn out to be the last masquerade in Palestine. Inspired by an archival photograph, "A Sketch of Manners" recreates an unconventional bon vivant aspect of Palestinian urban life before 1948.

Co-scripted with cultural critic Norman M. Klein, "A Sketch of Manners" is the first fragment of a work in progress, "Imagined Cities", which explores the imaginary of Jerusalem and Los Angeles as promised lands, signifiers beyond the real of the ordinary or real city. One of the guests present at Alfred Roch’s Pierrot Masquerade will end up, at some point in its life, in Hollywood...

Jumana Manna (born in 1987, lives and works in Jerusalem and Berlin) primarily uses film/video and sculpture to explore historical narratives, nationalism and subcultural communities. Her films are attempts at weaving together portraits of morally dubious characters or events, and her sculptural practice employs a language of minimalism and abstraction to reformulate familiar objects into a state of ambiguity, navigating between negation and seduction. Manna holds a BFA from the National Academy of the Arts, Oslo, and an MA in Aesthetics and Politics from California Institute of the Arts. Recent exhibitions include International Film Festival, Rotterdam, The 11th Sharjah Biennale, UKS (Young Artists Society, Oslo), and Vox Populli (Philadelphia). Upcoming exhibitions include Home Works Forum VI (Beirut), Sculpture Center (New York), Hennie Onstad Kunstsenter (Norway), Bergen Triennial, Kunsthall Oslo, Künstlerhaus Bethanien and Meeting Points curated by WHW. In 2012, she was awarded The Young Palestinian Artist of the Year Award from the A.M.Qattan Foundation.)

7 Ahmad Ghossein

My Father is Still a Communist: Intimate Secrets to be Published Lebanon| Video| 37 min | 2011

The Film All that is left from the relationship between Rachid and Maream is a large number of audio cassettes sent as love letters during the time of civil war in Lebanon. When I was a child, I invented stories about a father who was a war hero fighting with the Communist Party.

Ahmad Ghossein (Born in 1981 in Beirut) is a filmmaker and video artist. He won the Best Director Prize at the Beirut International Film Festival (2004) for his short film ‘Operation N…’ after having graduated with a degree in theatre arts from Lebanese University. His latest short film My Father is Still a Communist commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation 2011, was awarded best short film in Tribeca Doha film festival 2011. Ahmad has directed several documentaries, short films and videos. Other works include: 210m (2007) commissioned by Ashkal Alwan, Faces Applauding Alone (2008), What Does Not Resemble Me Looks Exactly Like Me (2009) with Ghassan Salhab and Mohamad Soueid, An Arab Comes to Town (2008), a documentary filmed in Denmark produced by DR2 His work has been screened in different film festivals, museums and galleries around the world: Berlin film festival,Oberhausen film festival, MoMa and New Museum in New York, Kunsthallen and Kunstforening in Oslo, Home works, Beirut and Dubai film festival to be named a few.

8 Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige

The Lost Film 42 min |2003

The Film Following the trail of a missing print of their first feature film, Around the Pink House in Yemen in 2000 —and mystified as to who would be sufficiently interested in their film to steal it—Hadjithomas and Joreige travel to Yemen. As their quest takes them from Sanaa to Aden, they find out their guide considers movies a sin, and encounter an open-air cinema showcasing Brigitte Nielsen movies in a country where censors compulsively blacklist most releases. The Lost Film is a subjective exploration of the image and status of film and filmmakers in the Middle East.

The Lost Film sheds insight into why a revolution would eventually come to a poor fragmented country like Yemen seemly fixated on its then-president for life Ali Abdullah Saleh. The day the copy of Around the Pink House went missing was the same day that Yemen’s Islamic north was constitutionally unified with its Marxist south on 22 May 2000. In the north, cinema was for the most part non-existent while the south, because of its militant tendencies, had a propensity for over-earnest documentaries. The lost film, Around the Pink House, is a portent for countries coming out of revolution. The experience of Beirut has always been accelerated as it pertains to the lives of cities in the region. Post civil war, the Lebanese capital was demolished in the cause of development and reconstruction. Similarly, once the now revolutionary countries of the Middle East are sucked into globalization and capitalism, they too will undergo a Beirut-style reconstruction of their rundown inner-city neighbourhoods, allowing for a new economic elite (which is really the old economic elite) to slide effortlessly back into power. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are active as filmmakers, artists and university instructors based in Beirut and Paris Their collective oeuvre comprises books, photo and video installations, short films and feature film.

9 Fayçal Baghriche

The Message Video| 185 min| 2010

The Film Baghriche's film brings together the English and Arabic versions of the epic film The Message (1977), which tells the story about the birth of the Islamic faith. Directed by Moustapha Akkad, the two versions were shot simultaneously following the same script and using the same sets and costumes; the only difference to be found is the languages spoken and the actors, who were drawn from the world of Arab cinema and of Hollywood, in order to appeal to different audiences. Synthesising these two versions into a single edit that follows the script's complete structure, Baghriche creates a dialogue bilingual conversation between the Arab and American actors. Referring to cinema's universalism, and language, Baghriche reinterprets the film, as well as the medium itself, into a platform for exchange and encounter. Fayçal Baghriche (Born in 1972 in Algeria) grew up between two cultures, navigating an Arab culture in the private sphere and Western culture in the public realm. This particular kind of double consciousness, common to those who have migrated to culturally different societies, has provided him with a perspective defined by the superimposition of two distinct cultural filters. His practice is characterised by simple gestures, which are often attainable without recourse to any specialist expertise. Drawing on fundamental principals of image rhetoric such as subtraction, inversion or acceleration, he creates artworks that question the schema that organises human societies.