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Akram Zaatari
Rabih Mroué
Khaled Sabsabi
Sharif Waked
Hassan Khan
Walid Ra’ad/The Atlas Group
Jacqueline Salloum
Shahram Entekhabi
Mariam Ghani
Nooshin Farhid
Mahmoud Yekta
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Saturday 15 April 2–5pm Curator: Tim Welfare, and special international Guest: Akram Zaatari
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About
Tim Welfare Download essay
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Name:
Sharif Waked Biography: Sharif Waked is a painter, filmmaker, graphic designer and children's book illustrator. His work has been shown internationally including at the Sharjah Biennale in 2003, while receiving prizes including the Anderson Prize and Mark of Distinction, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, for children's book illustration, 'A Child Going Upstairs'. |
Title:
Chic Point Synopsis:
Chic Point ponders, imagines, and
interrogates "fashion for Israeli checkpoints." Set to
the backdrop of a heavy rhythmic beat, men on catwalks model one
design after another in an exploration of form and content. Zippers
weaved nets, hoods, and buttons serve the unifying theme of exposed
flesh. Body parts - lower backs, chests, abdomens - peek through
holes, gaps, and splits woven into readymade silk and cotton t-shirts,
robes, and shirts. As the sights and sounds of the fast paced catwalk
dim to a close, the viewer is transported to the West Bank and Gaza.
One man after another lifts shirts, robes, and jackets. Some kneel
shirtless, others naked, with guns poised at their exposed flesh. |
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Hassan Khan Biography:
Hassan Khan works in the audio-visual medium, producing videos and
video installations, as well as composing soundtracks for theatre
and contemporary dance. His work has been installed, screened and
exhibited in festivals, art galleries and public spaces in Europe,
Asia, the United States, and of course Egypt and the region. Khan
lives in Cairo, Egypt.
Title: Sometime/Somewhere
Else Synopsis: An attempt at exploring the fluid framing of a personal identity in relation to an outside... footage from an interview with a 15-year-old Khan on a Swedish TV program about Egyptian youth is related to the 17 year old videomaker playing his electric guitar.
Title: 100
Portraits 100 Portraits of individuals from the city of Cairo, projected on to an aerial shot of the city, with each person stating where they make there home in a heterogeneous urban space. |
Title:
Tabla Dubb #9 Synopsis: Khan mixes the music he has created out of the intersection between the tabla and electronica to video loops shot and edited to accompany that music. Tabla Dubb is an attempt at fashioning a public media that uses a foundational element in popular Egyptian musical culture (the tabla), within the context of a performance based using media such as music and video, while refusing to engage in the reductionist discussions around the "traditional and contemporary" imposed and continuously promoted by official culture and the discourse of dominant institutions.
Title: This
is the Political Film Synopsis: This is the Political Film uses the cut-up to hyper load a sentence that becomes a slogan. The political is consciously defined through an easily accessible code.
Title: Six
Questions for the Lebanese Synopsis: In swooping pans of the reconstruction area of downtown Beirut, a vertiginous array of commentary and analysis follows. Khan questions post civil war Lebanon, which he then question himself, ‘My one minute is about my inability’. Related to Khan's ongoing anti-advertisement series this piece utilizes direct questions to the audience as part of a longer research spanning several projects. |
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Name:
Walid Ra’ad/The Atlas Group Biography: Walid Raad grew up in Lebanon and now lives and works in the U.S. The Atlas Group, the fictional entity through which Lebanese artist Walid Raad operates, is an on-going project devoted to researching and documenting the contemporary history of Lebanon. This documentation, which includes notebooks, films, videotapes, and photographs, is organized into archives that are situated between the false binary of fiction and non-fiction; some of the archived documents are real and others invented. Raad is also a member of the Arab Image Foundation, started in 1996 to promote historical research of the visual culture of the Arab world, and to promote experimental video production in the region. |
Title:
Hostage, The Bachar Tapes
Synopsis: Ra’ad’s video narrates the story of Souheil Bachar, the sole Arabic hostage to be held in a Beirut cell with westerners Terry Anderson and Terry Waite in the mid 1980s. An exercise in deceit, conceit and the West’s fetishisation of ‘the Arab’, Hostage is confronting viewing in these politically murky times. |
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Name:
Jacqueline Salloum Biography: Jacqueline Salloum is a Palestinian-American who lives and works in New York. Her most recent work focuses on challenging the stereotypes of Arabs in film and media in the form of video, collage, toys and gumball machines. |
Title:
Planet of the Arabs Synopsis: A trailer-esque montage spectacle of Hollywood's relentless vilification and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims. Out of 1000 films that have Arab & Muslim characters (from yrs 1896 to 2000) 12 were positive depictions, 52 were even handed and the rest of the 900 and so were negative. Inspired by the book "Reel Bad Arabs" by Dr. Jack Shaheen. Festivals and Awards:
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Shahram Entekhabi Biography: Entekhabi left Iran in 1979 after he studied graphic design at the University of Tehran. Arriving in Italy he studied architecture and urbanism, before residing in Germany since 1983. Since 2001 he has been active in the field of video art, painting, installation, performance and community based art. |
Title:
Happy Meal Synopsis:
In a world of mounting tensions between the Middle East and the
much of the West, Happy Meal, presents
a collision of cultures with a sympathetic eye; as a young girl
wearing a chador; a dark traditional garment worn by Muslim women
unabashedly eating and enjoying a “Happy
Meal” from McDonalds. There is no dialogue in the film,
and the sole sound is the music track of children singing Islamic
songs in praise of Allah. |
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Mariam Ghani Biography: Mariam Ghani is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work in video, installation, new media, text and public dialogue performance investigates how history is constructed and reconstructed as narrative in the present, particularly in the border zones and political spaces of transition where past, present and future emerge as stories told in translation, contest and counterpoint. Her work has been exhibited internationally since 1999, including screenings in the UK, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Czeckslovakia, Brazil, Korea and the US. |
Title:
Friendly Fire Synopsis: Friendly fire dramatizes the split Ghani felt as an Afghan American when the US bombed Afghanistan in October 2001. Ghani in her sleep knocks over a glass beside her bed which enters her dreams as a rain of shard as red as the pomegranate seeds she ate as a child and US troops with green night vision glasses parachuting landing behind her eyelids. A week later the first casualties were announced as the result of friendly fire. |
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Name: Nooshin Farhid
Biography: Nooshin Farhid was born in Tehran, Iran and came to the UK as a political refugee. Her practice started in London. She recently won a Cultural Diversity award at SPACE at The Triangle, London. Her video work has been shown in exhibitions, festivals and biennales across Europe and in the UK . |
Title: Hair Salon Synopsis: Hair Salon is a highly humorous piece that explores the notion of beauty and bodily fascination. Set in the hubbub of Canada's Toronto metropolitan Iranian district where the work appears to have a filmic quality, with its sharp high-resolution colours and immaculate editing. Farhid presents a series of dis-jointed and deliberately hesitant narratives, which follows the journey of beautification within the interior space of the salon contrasted by the architectural make up of the nearby streets that are satiated with rubbish and graffiti. The aural dimension in the work is equally hypnotic with the introduction of a foreign language, Persian, both in the exchange of dialogue between the young woman and her stylist and the sound of the radio, which is playing Iranian pop music, while the maddening sound and image of the television screen showing a break dancing competition, which is then interrupted with the sound of the girl frantically chewing gum. Within the Hair Salon there is this deep-seated sense of non-completion, with Farhid's non-linear trend of constantly keeping her audience on their toes. |
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Name:
Mahmoud Yekta Biography: Mahmoud Yekta is a Residential Care Worker, writer and filmmaker. He has been making experimental short, documentary and very short films for the past fifteen years including award winning documentary ‘Colour Bars’ (1997). |
Title:
Sorry Synopsis: Sorry shows a video in which a naked figure literally humps the earth. Cold white flesh rises and falls against muddy black soil. It is like a killing field for the emotions, made all the more poignant when he turns to face the camera and says one word. ‘Sorry’ maybe is an apology to Australia indigenous people; maybe not? Maybe it is just an indignant word which has lost its meaning. |
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