ON LANDSCAPES, RUINS AND PATTERNS OF REMEMBERING
Featuring work by: Basma AlSharif, Coleman Collins, Sky Hopinka, Emily Jacir, Joe Namy, and Oraib Toukan
Curated by Fawz Kabra
Screening of Remind me to Remember to Forget, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason, 15 Palestinian Minutes in Palestine, Lydda Airport, Libretto-o-o, Specular fiction, and CAPITAL
Followed by Q&A with Emily Jacir and Coleman Collins
ON LANDSCAPES, RUINS AND PATTERNS OF REMEMBERING is a program of video works that unfold a politics of image-making, reviewing and recounting social and cultural histories as they are explored through contemporary frameworks. The program is prompted by a work from the ArteArchive—Toukan’s performance video, Remind me to Remember to Forget (2006), after Mahmoud Darwish’s 1982 prose poem, “Memory for Forgetfulness.” The artist proposes to reverse the act of writing and the will to remember, consequently dispersing the written word and suspending it in memory and reimagination.
Revisiting Toukan’s video eighteen years later, in a global context that remains anxious with war and impending invasions, Remind me to Remember to Forget is revisited in conversation with works by Alsharif, Collins, Hopinka, Jacir, and Namy. Through minimalist experiments and lyrical narratives the works address profound violences of colonial erasure of land and people, the legacies of exile and dispersion, and our relationship to objects and images when only image and replica remain.
In their distinct structural explorations of cycles and repetitions, these works deal with the promises and devastating blunders of modernity. They connect to land, time, and space in a contemporary world charged with a renewed authoritarian tendency that swings from guise and symbolism to blatant and annihilating power. Between lived experiences and replicated environments, these works present a receding natural world, real and imagined sites, and archives that render the architectures of a modern time swept up in a coup of capitalist developments and techno-autocratic fascist regimes.
ON LANDSCAPES, RUINS AND PATTERNS OF REMEMBERING is curated by Fawz Kabra and is co-presented by ArteEast and e-flux. This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. Selections from the program will be screened in-person at e-flux on Tuesdat, September 24 followed by a Q&A with filmmakers Emily Jacir and Coleman Collins. For information about the screening on September 24, visit e-flux.com. The full program will be screened online on artearchive.org from September 19 – 29.
Film Program:
Remind me to Remember to Forget, Oraib Toukan, 2006, 2 min.
A performance video referencing Mahmoud Darwish’s 1982 classic “Memory for Forgetfulness”. Made 18 years ago the work is part of a duology titled Counting Memories following the summer of 2006 when Israel launched a war on both Gaza and Lebanon one month apart. The video reveres the act of writing and the will to remember. In Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s words (2007): “(Pushing) memory into the realm of performance and allowing for its willful suspension in the imagination as fantasy and, quite possibly, as future”.
Mnemonics of Shape and Reason, Sky Hopinka, 2021, 4 min.
Hopinka’s video Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021) traverses the memory of a place and space visited by the artist. Employing an original syntax of storytelling, the artist interweaves scattered and reassembled landscapes with layers of captured audio, poetic text, and music. A rhythmic account of the spiritual implications of colonial plunder, Hopinka’s fluid reflections transmute ideas of spiritual malleability tied to land, sky, sea, myth, place, and personhood.
15 Palestinian Minutes in Palestine, Emily Jacir, 2001, 16 min.
15 Palestinian Minutes in Palestine, filmed in 2000 in the months prior to the second intifada, is a montage of low-quality footage from everyday life. Comprised of fifteen one-minute clips shot in various parts of Palestine from Gaza to Akka including Jerusalem, Hebron, Ramallah, Gaza City, and Bethlehem.
Lydda Airport, Emily Jacir, 2009, 5 min.
Lydda Airport takes place at the eponymous location sometime in the mid to late 1930s—the period in which the airport was still under construction but also functioning. Built in 1936 by the British, Lydda Airport was an important stop along the “Empire Route” for their national airline, Imperial Airways. Until 1939 it was the world’s largest aerodrome. Central to the film’s narrative is Hannibal, one of eight planes that made up the Handley Page fleet, the largest passenger planes in the world at that time. Hannibal mysteriously disappeared in 1940 somewhere over the Gulf of Oman en route to Sharjah.
Libretto-o-o, Joe Namy, 2024, 5 min.
Libretto-o-o is an exploration of the history and resonance of Middle Eastern opera. Shot across six historically significant opera houses in Algiers, Beirut, Cairo, Marrakech, Muscat, and Tunis – some of which were never completed, others ranking amongst the most lavish theaters ever constructed – this architecture film offers a meditative portrait of the grand theater; and the poetics, drama, and politics that fade into its proscenium. This film is part of a larger body of artworks exploring the storied history of opera houses in 11 Arab countries,reflecting on history, desire and estrangement, nationhood and mythology, extinction and exile, and includes a collection of short fiction, a large scale opera curtain, and other sculptures and sounds.
Specular Fiction, Coleman Collins, 2024, 8 min.
Primarily derived from 3D scans of objects, and with a particular focus on digital replicas of West African architectural sites, Specular fiction is a short, speculative narrative video that traces the complex relationships between seemingly dichotomous terms: original and copy; object and image; real and virtual space. In an imagined future of indeterminate distance, the objects of the world have been destroyed, leaving only the mirror-world of their digital replicas behind. Specular fiction expands upon the artist’s ongoing research into the resonances between notions of diaspora and technological methods of transmission, copying, and reiteration.
Capital, Basma al-Sharif,2023, 17 min.
As Egypt sinks further into poverty, new cities are being erected across the country and prisons fill with dissenting opinions. Since it is currently not possible to safely speak about this: a ventriloquist, songs, and advertisements describe a seemingly bygone era of fascism
Biographies:
Basma al-Sharif is a Palestinian artist/filmmaker whose work explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works. She received an MFA from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 2007, and was a resident of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in 2009 and of the Pavillon Neuflize OBC at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014-15. She received a Jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial in 2009, was awarded a Visual Arts of the Fundación Botín in 2010, was a recipient of Mophradat’s Consortium Commissions in 2018, a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme for 2022-2023, and was nominated for the Prix Aware for 2024. Al-Sharif’s major exhibitions include: De Appel, the Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series for the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, Modern Mondays at MOMA, CCA Glasgow, SALT Galata, the Whitney Biennial, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, Berlin Documentary Forum, and Manifesta 8. Her films have screened in the international film festivals of Locarno, Berlin, Mar del Plata, Milan, London, Toronto, New York, Montreal, and Yamagata amongst others. She is based in Berlin.
Coleman Collins (b. 1986, Princeton, NJ) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Collins received his MFA from UCLA, Los Angeles in 2018 and was a 2017 resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, ME. He participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 2019. Previous exhibitions and screenings have taken place at Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Herald St, London, UK (2024); Soldes, Los Angeles, CA (2023); the Palestine Festival of Literature, Jerusalem, IS/Ramallah, PS (2023); Hesse Flatow, New York, NY (2022); Brief Histories, New York, NY (2022); Carré d’Art, Nîmes, FR (2022); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, AT (2021); Nothing Special, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY (2019); Artspace, New Haven, CT (2019) and Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA (2018). His work is in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Collins is a 2022 recipient of a Graham Foundation research grant and has received support from NYFA and Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. He is currently Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine.
Sky Hopinka’s work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, and language designs as containers of culture, often expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media. His video, photo, and text work have been exhibited and screened internationally at festivals, museums, and art centers, including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, the FRONT Triennial, and the 14th Gwangju Biennial. He was a 2022 MacArther Fellow and winner of the 2023 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel.
As poetic as it is political and biographical, Emily Jacir’s work investigates silenced histories, exchange, translation, transformation, and resistance. Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre through a diverse range of media and methodologies that include unearthing historical material, performative gestures, and in-depth research. She investigates personal and collective movement through time and space and its implications on the physical and social experience. Drawing on rituals such as dances, processions, and games, the artist charts the way space, collectivity, and memories are claimed. Jacir has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 and is deeply invested in creating alternative spaces for knowledge production internationally. She has been honored for her work internationally, including an honorary doctorate from NCAD in Dublin, Ireland (2023); an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize (2023); the Andrew W. Mellon Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015); the Alpert Award (2011); Hugo Boss Prize, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); and the Golden Lion, Venice Biennale (2007). She is the founder of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem.
Fawz Kabra is a curator and writer living in New York. She is director and curator of Brief Histories, a publishing platform and art gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, where she organizes exhibitions and public programs. She was Assistant Curator at Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York and has curated and organized exhibitions at the Brooklyn Public Library; Columbia University Wallach Art Gallery, NY; the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, NY; BRIC Arts and Media House, Brooklyn; and the Palestinian Museum, Ramallah; and symposia at Global Art Forum 13, Dubai and The Armory Show, New York. Her writing and interviews have appeared in Art Papers, Canvas, e-flux Film, Ibraaz, and Ocula. Kabra’s editorial projects include Through the Ruins: Talks on Human Rights & the Arts 1 (2023), published by the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, Bard College. She is Curator at FIT School of Art and Design, New York, and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies.
Joe Namy is an artist and musician based in London, who often works collaboratively on public sculptures, sound installations, and performances. Namy’s work considers the social construction of sound and the forces that enable its transmission. Some projects have addressed the gender dynamics of bass, or the migration patterns of instruments, and the translation between languages, between score and sound, between drum and dance. Other projects by Namy explore the history and resonance of opera houses in the Middle East and the archive of Egyptian-American musician Halim El-Dabh, a pioneer of electronic music.
Oraib Toukan is an artist, writer, and educator. She is an EUME fellow at the Transregional Forum, Berlin and was a Clarendon scholar at the University of Oxford, Ruskin School of Art where she completed her PhD in 2019. Until 2015 she was head of the Arts Division and Media Studies Program at Bard College at Al Quds University. Toukan is author of the book Sundry Modernism: Materials for a Study of Palestinian Modernism (2017).