On landscapes, ruins, and patterns of remembering

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, September 24 at 7pm for the screening program On landscapes, ruins, and patterns of remembering​, guest-curated by Fawz Kabra and co-presented with ArteEast.

Featuring artists Basma al-Sharif, Coleman Collins, Sky Hopinka, Emily Jacir, Joe Namy, and Oraib Toukan, the video works in On landscapes, ruins and patterns of remembering 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 al-Sharif, 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, the 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 co-presented by e-flux and ArteEast in the context of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents over seventeen years of film and video programming by ArteEast.

The program at e-flux Screening Room will be followed by a conversation with Coleman Collins and Emily Jacir, moderated by Fawz Kabra. The films will also be screened online on artearchive.org from September 27-October 4, with additional works by Emily Jacir (letter to a friend, 2019) and Oraib Toukan (Via Dolorosa, 2021). For more information on the online screening, visit artearchive.org.

Films

Oraib Toukan, Remind me to Remember to Forget (2006, 2 minutes)
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”.

Sky Hopinka, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021, 4 minutes)
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.

Emily Jacir, 15 Palestinian Minutes in Palestine (2001, 16 minutes)
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.

Emily Jacir, Lydda Airport (2009, 5 minutes)
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.

Joe Namy, Libretto-o-o (2024, 5 minutes)
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.

Coleman Collins, Specular Fiction (2024, 8 minutes)
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.

Basma al-Sharif, Capital (2023, 17 minutes)
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.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility                    
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.         
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.                  
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.