Thursday, April 12, 2012, 7:30 pm, $6
MENA Experimental: Recent Experimental Film and New Media from the Middle East, North Africa, and Diasporas
The Arts at CIIS, in collaboration with ATA, presents MENA Experimental, an ongoing occasional series featuring experimental film and new media from the Middle East, North Africa, and their diasporas. This first evening includes recent short films and videos from emerging and established international artists, live music during intermission, and a reception. Curated by Targol Mesbah and Deirdre Visser.
Part 1. Intimate Distance
The program’s first half explores forms of intimate relationships in both social and private spaces; in moments barely palpable, and at other times relating to state and colonial power. Each film navigates gender norms differently, with complexity and depth. (45 mins)
This Smell of Sex
This Smell of Sex, 2008
Danielle Arbid, Lebanon/France, Super 8 and DV, 20:00 min
Found film footage from flea markets around Beirut offers images of girls playfully engaging the camera. The Super-8 footage alternates with black screen while we hear intimate stories of men and women discussing their formative experiences and their fantasies.
Born in Lebanon in 1970, Danielle Arbid left her country at the age of 17 to study literature in Paris. In 1997 she started making films. Interested in different narrative forms, her work alternates between fiction, first person documentaries and video essays. Selected by a number of festivals around the world, her films have received both critical and public acclaim as well as several awards including the Golden Leopard and Silver Leopard at the Locarno film festival as well as the Albert Londres prize and a grant from the Villa Medicis.
Moored
Atracados / Moored, 2012
Filipe Rodrigues Afonso, Portugal, DV, 10 min
Two boys sitting at the edge of a harbor talk about leaving their home and city. Although they feel they can’t live outside, when one of them remembers a dream in which they were walking inside the sea, the other reacts and takes the lead.
Filipe Afonso was born in Portugal in 1985, studied film editing at Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema and Cinema at Film and TV School of Performing Arts in Prague, Czech Republic. Moored is his first film.
From the Bed & Breakfast Notebooks
From the Bed & Breakfast Notebooks, 2009
Alexandra Handal, Palestine, UK, HDV, 13:46
In West Jerusalem some expropriated Palestinian homes that are now occupied by Israeli Jews have been converted into bed and breakfasts promising tourists “an authentic experience of Jerusalem.” Site specific footage gleaned from a 13 night stay in one of these spaces in 2007 is interlaced with the story of an airport body search. The result is an account where multiple stories unfold through layers of sound, image and text, uncovering—like a crime scene investigation—the remnants of a denied past against an oppressive presence.
Alexandra Handal is a London-based Palestinian visual artist, filmmaker, independent researcher and essayist. Handal holds a combined practice/theory PhD from the University of the Arts London, for which she was the recipient of the UAL Research Studentship Award, and the Chelsea College of Art and Design Graduate Fund.
Mithajibat
Mithajibat Women Washing the Brothel Storefront, 2011
Edward Salem, France, 16mm transferred to DV, 2:30
“I asked Mithajibat women in Paris to wash the filthy windows of a brothel in Pigalle, Paris’ red light district (Muslim women who cover their hair are known in Arabic as Mithajibat). The French government has outlawed the burqa and attempted to ban the hijab from public schools on the pretext that these garments oppress women. That these proscriptions are motivated by xenophobia masquerading as concern for women is evidenced by the government’s protection of the Pigalle brothels, where women are degraded in a way not even comparable to the wearing of a headscarf. In the context of a simple and voluntary act of service and protest, the condition of the Muslim women is contrasted with that of the prostitutes, whose debasement is perhaps the truest measure of the French government’s concern for women.” –Edward Salem
Edward Salem is a Palestinian American artist and curator living between Chicago and Beirut. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Solo exhibitions include: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah; and Eel Space, Chicago. His work has also been exhibited and screened in New York, London, Berlin, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Madrid, among others. He recently curated an exhibition at the Kodra 11 Contemporary Art Festival in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Intermission with a performance by Bay Area-based experimental musician Nadia Shihab.
Nadia Shihab is a documentary filmmaker and experimental musician living in San Francisco, California.
Part 2. Witness, Amiss
The films in the second half explore the ethics of looking at images of suffering and war. The role of the artist in mediating, appropriating, and reframing images of violence emerges as a focus across the various works. These films navigate the ethics and complicities of viewership within new media technologies of representation and warfare. (43 mins)
Realized Phantoms
Realized Phantoms, 2011
Azin Seraj and Ali Dadgar, US, DV, 19 min
Originally part of an interactive video installation piece created collaboratively by Azin Seraj and Ali Dadgar, this piece draws from iconic footage of historical events to explicitly frame viewers as participants in these historical moments. The footage digitally dissolves into colorful abstractions while the audio melodically morphs the images together and sets up a hypnotic and meditative environment. This work asks us to confront the ethically troublesome relationship between the work of the artist and the struggle for political freedom.
An Iranian native, Canadian citizen, and American resident, new media artist Azin Seraj explores and navigates the uses of technology as a powerful tool for relating across borders, mapping transnational identity, capturing beauty in the mundane, and exploring self-reflection. Seraj received her BFA with Honors Distinction from University of Victoria, Canada, and an MFA from University of California, Berkeley.
Bay Area-based Iranian artist Ali Dadgar’s multidisciplinary experimental practice includes photography, printmaking, painting, installation, performance and video. He holds a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California Berkeley. Dadgar’s most recent project, Radiant States: Reflections on Solidarity, opened in February 2012 at CIIS in San Francisco.
Burning Falling Brushing
Burning Falling Brushing, 2011
Jacopo Natoli, Italy/Syria, DV, 6 min
“I followed the development of the videos produced by the Syrian revolutionaries since the very beginning. I was struck by a type of image I wasn’t used to dealing with, that is a low-resolution image, blurred, without voice-over, raw, close to the body and to what was happening; the event wasn’t observed but experienced. Beyond the violence (reason at the basis of the refusal by the TV channels to transmit these images), there was something more that struck me, an unusual feeling of involvement, that was certainly a little spectacular. The images that I faced (I’m facing, I will face) didn’t correspond to any of the critical and aesthetic parameters I had been familiar with..” –Jacopo Natoli
Jacopo Natoli was born in Rome in 1985, and lives and works in Florence. He received a BA in painting from the Academy of Fine Art in Rome and an MFA from the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London.
Untitled, 2011
Jacopo Natoli, Italy/Syria, DV, 1:30 min
This short video of highly mediated images from a scene of violence in revolutionary Syria is part of the artist’s ongoing struggle to grapple with the immediate images of violence pouring out of the country. The usual technologies used for making sense or ordering information—numbers, voice-over, texts—become hauntingly inadequate.
Jacopo Natoli was born in Rome in 1985, and lives and works in Florence. He received a BA in painting from the Academy of Fine Art in Rome and an MFA from the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London.
All Inclusive
All Inclusive, 2012
Beate Hecher and Markus Keim, Austria/Egypt, DV, 8min
The panoramic view of a hotel ruin in the Egyptian desert; the yesterday that will no longer see the tomorrow; a depraved despot in the landscape in snorkeling gear; protests; screams; the report of a hotel manager about the supply situation of the First World in Egypt; shots; an interrupted telephone connection; an apocalyptic colonial composition, whose perspective is the zero.
Beate Hecher was born in 1972 in Austria, studied in Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and worked with various media of film, video, performance, installation and theater works.
Markus Keim was born in 1969 in Italy and works with various media of film, video, performance, installation and theater works.
Their collaborative works were invited to the several international festivals and venues.
Camp, 2010
Peter Freund, US, 35mm, 16mm, HDV, 7min
This experimental short juxtaposes the political and theatrical senses of “camp” as a metaphor for our contemporary cultural deadlock between two post-modernist sensibilities. Guiding this split (parallax) vision, two narrative voices (one in Mandarin, the other in Arabic) mix venerated cultural statements with original commentary, while factual and fictive footage provide support, context, and counterpoint.
Peter Freund is a multimedia artist and scholar based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He works with the moving image, sound, text, and interactive media, exploring questions of alterity (or ‘otherness’) in its psychological and political dimension. His work has been exhibited internationally, including the U.S., Latin America, Europe, Australia, Asia, and the Middle East. Freund is Associate Professor of Art Practice at Saint Mary’s College of California, where he teaches media art practice and critical theory.
Still from Edward Salem's Beard Burn
Beard Burn (Homage to Mohamed Bouazizi), 2011
Edward Salem, Tunisia/France, HDV, 0:55
Mohamed Bouazizi was a 26-year-old Tunisian whose self-immolation in front of a local government building became the catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution. Bouazizi’s act of protest was also the first in a wave of eight self-immolations in the Arab world that inspired and emboldened activists in the region, sparking revolutionary protests in several other Arab countries.
Edward Salem is a Palestinian American artist and curator living between Chicago and Beirut. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Solo exhibitions include: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah; and Eel Space, Chicago. His work has also been exhibited and screened in New York, London, Berlin, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Madrid, among others. He recently curated an exhibition at the Kodra 11 Contemporary Art Festival in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Reception
The Arab Film Festival is a community co-sponsor.