Berlin
Dec 5, 7pm CET, 1pm EST
Join us as we take a look through the eyes of three Palestinian artists. The programme includes an introduction to the Gaza Strip as a microcosm for the failure of civilisation, a journey across the heavily militarised Sinai Peninsula, and a portrait of masculine performativity in East Jerusalem.
After the screening, stay for a conversation between filmmakers Basma al-Sharif, Shadi Habib Allah, and Jumana Manna. The discussion will be moderated by artist and writer Bassem Saad.
Partners
Films
Daga'a
Shadi Habib Allah
Led by a network of Bedouin smugglers, Shadi Habib Allah embarks on a journey across the heavily militarised Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. Navigating an unmapped terrain, the smugglers’ only signposts are the stories they share about the stakes of living, dying, and traversing this mysterious space. Shot by Habib Allah over a number of months, the nonlinear film recounts several journeys in which the artist passes through one Bedouin network and into another, as if he himself were goods being smuggled.
Shadi Habib Allah’s practice ranges from film, sculpture and drawing to installation. While each project defines its own terms based on research and physical engagement, a common thread is the opening up of suggestive modes of navigation across circulation networks of people, technologies, objects, images and economy, in order to examine ideas of use and value and the structures that hold them in place.
Born in Jerusalem, Palestine in 1977, Shadi Habib Allah received a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in 2003 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2010.
Home Movies Gaza
Basma al-Sharif
An introduction to the Gaza Strip as a microcosm for the failure of civilization. In an attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic of human rights, this video claims a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complicated, derelict, and altogether impossible to separate from its political identity.
Basma al-Sharif (b. 1983) is a Palestinian artist working in cinema and installation. She developed her practice nomadically between the Middle East, Europe, and North America and is currently based in Berlin. Her practice looks at cyclical political conflicts and confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.
She received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007, was a resident of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in 2009, and the Pavillon Neuflize OBC at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014-15. She received a Jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial in 2009, the Visual Arts Grant from the Fundación Botín in 2010, Mophradat’s Consortium Commissions in 2018, and is currently a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme for 2022-2023
Blessed Blessed Oblivion
Jumana Manna
BLESSED BLESSED OBLIVION is a portrait of masculine performativity in East Jerusalem, as manifested in gyms, body shops and barber shops. Inspired by Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), the film uses visual collage and the musical soundtrack as ironic commentary. Anger’s subjects — leather-clad bikers, serve as a counterpoint to the culture Manna attempts to portray, that of male ‘thug’ culture. Simultaneously psychologizing the characters and seduced by them, Manna finds herself in a double bind similar to the conflicted desire that animates her protagonist as he drifts from abject rants to declamations of heroic poetry or unashamed self-praise.
Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of archaeology, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.