NOVEMBER 19 - December 03, 2021
barbican cinemas | ica | curzon soho | soas
DOUBLE BILL (+ SCREEN TALK)
THE SUN AND THE LOOKING GLASS | BEAST TYPE SONG
SunDAY 21 NOVEMBER | 20:30
ica: THE MALL, ST. JAMES'S, SW1Y 5AH
Experimenting with different forms of language - cinema, text, performance, etc. - this double bill interrogates the intricacies of narrative. Milena Desse takes us back to a time remembered, but untold and kept buried in the land. Sophia Al Maria takes us forward, where with the help of luminaries on and off-screen, she subverts the perversions of her own authored stories.
The Sun and the Looking Glass: for one easily forgets but the tree remembers
Milena Desse | 2020 | 23'
On a land perpetually threatened by colonial appropriation, the transmission of history and narratives plays a particular and vital role. The Sun and the Looking Glass - for one easily forgets but the tree remembers is an artistic essay-film. It paints a portrait of a place on a hill above the West Bank village of Ein Qiniya. Surrounded by earth, roads, and trees, the landscape pulls us into an undying world before walls, before checkpoints, before erasure. There, we go back in time through objects uncovered in the renovation of two late Ottoman houses. Looking at the objects through a magnifying lens, the film becomes part performance, part historical document told through disappearances and revelations. To blind oneself to anything in this place, to erase it from the narrative, is to exploit the past to justify the present.
Beast Type Song
Sophia Al Maria | 2019 | 40’
Beast Type Song is cast against the science fiction backdrop of a solar battle, as evoked by Etel Adnan in her 1989 war poem, The Arab Apocalypse. In the poem, Adnan uses drawings and symbols to communicate what cannot be expressed in words. Similarly, Al Maria explores the revision of history through graphic and bodily gestures. When words cannot express trauma, a new language of drawings, movement and music gives voice to the speechless. The protagonists reflect on the narrative and languages they have inherited as children of various colonial legacies. Each figure encounters some form of violence either through the hostile gaze of the camera or through the imposition of narrative. We are told stories of a violence inflicted on the body, but at the same time are asked to consider the violence of the storytelling itself. In Beast Type Song language, education and writing are interwoven in an examination of the erasure and revision of identities and histories past and future. By weaving together music, literature, oral history, film and dance, the film serves as an escape route from the repetition of dominant narratives of an oppressive past. The work features performance by Yumna Marwan, Elizabeth Peace and boychild, as well as Al Maria herself.
UPDATE: This session will be followed by a very special discussion with artist and filmmaker, Sophia AlMaria and actor, Yumna Marwan. They will be hosted by artist and curator, Amal Khalaf.