15 - 30

NOV 2019

THE BARBICAN | CURZON SOHO | INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS | THE RIO l THE TABERNACLE | SOAS | P21

STATES OF BEING: EXPERIMENTAL REFLECTIONS ON PLACE AND MEMORY

In Vitro | Its A Long Way From Amphioxus | The White Elephant | There (Hounak) | Tuesday By The Sea

Thursday 21st November | 8:45pm
BARBICAN, BEECH STREET, EC2Y 8DS

This curated selection of Palestinian shorts explores sci-fi themes through experimenta.
Your memories are not your own, the land you are on is somewhere else, the barriers of these spaces limit your entire being. These 5 shorts by renowned and emerging artists occilate between space and time, the inherited and the actual. This session of otherworldly realities presents exciting new work by Larissa Sansour and Forensic Architecture’s Shourideh C. Molavi, and UK premieres by Kamal Aljafari and Shuruq Harb.

In Vitro
2019 l Larissa Sansour & Soren Lind l 27’
Set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. A vast bunker under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. A conversation between two scientists soon evolves into an intimate dialogue about memory, exile and nostalgia. Central to their discussion is the intricate relationship between past, present and future, with the Bethlehem setting providing a narratively, politically and symbolically charged backdrop.

Its A Long Way From Amphioxus
2019 l Kamal Aljafari l 17’
Kamal Aljafari’s new short film once again collapses time, questioning the meaning of life in a system in which humanity is reduced to a number and the value of one’s future is measured by applications within grey hallways. Step into this black hole, where bones and flesh have become numbers in a queuing system. With surreal humor, this film observes the origins of our being versus the future of how we are defined. What have we become from our point of origin until today’s chaos of bureaucratic mazes? It’s a long way from Amphioxus, we all came from there.

The White Elephant
2018 l Shuruq Harb l 12’
Artist Shuruq Harb imagines a stream of consciousness based on memories and anxieties driven by grief and teenage angst. The 1990’s were a time of personal loss, a new horizon of internet imagery, and new hopes of the Oslo Accords. Shuruq worries about friendship and romance in this political climate, but also physical and national identity confusions.

There (Hounak)
2018 l Mohamed Sabah l 4’
A young man thinks of his family's Palestine, a place he's never been to but lives so near to. A disconnected sound, a saturated colour, a strange dream; this 4-minute film takes us to a memory and a quest that belongs to someone else.

Tuesday By The Sea
2019 l Shourideh C. Molavi l 7’
The border demarcates the inside and outside. Conceptually two-dimensional and two-sided, but without a clear beginning and end, the border creates a length and not a width. This short film, with no dialogue, cuts between two locations, allowing us to see the very real distinctions of two places on a single day.