Online Event

Transmissions with Yazan Khalili

Season 3, Episode 5

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Wed 15 Sep from 21.00

Fri 17 Sep from 10.00

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Architect and visual artist Yazan Khalili curates an episode of Transmissions, featuring Noor Abed, Noor Abuarafeh, Dina Mimi and Amani Yacoub.

Entitled Place? What Place? I don’t see a place here… this episode of Transmissions is curated by Yazan Khalili who lives and works in and out of Palestine. He is an architect, visual artist, educator, and cultural producer. He is co-founder of Radio Alhara.

Sometimes but especially during our current time, places and images have collided and became one. The image is the place, and the place is an image. The 5 videos by Palestinian artists included within Place? What Place? I don’t see a place here… are asking, contemplating, and playing with this confusion between place and image.

They inhabit one and run away from the other. They jump between what they are, videos on a screen, to claiming to be the only possible places where social and political events can occur. Are these images of places? Or are they places that exist only in images? Do these questions matter anymore?

About the artists and their work

Noor Abed

Noor Abed (b.1988 Jerusalem) works at the intersection of performance, media and film, a process of image making that is intertwined with forms of movement and choreography.

Abed attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York in 2015-16. She holds an MFA in Photography and Media from California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, and a BA from the International Academy of Arts – Palestine.

Out of Joint, 2018
16mm digital transfer & SD (Standard Definition) Video
10:43’ min/ no sound

Combining 16mm footage of a staged dance of two men, and documentary SD footage (pre –wedding celebration in Palestine), the work highlights the affinities and tensions between performativity and performance. One of a staged choreography, the other of one cultural embodiment, while the third develops through editing.

Noor Abuarafeh

Noor Abuarafeh (b.1986), based between Jerusalem and Cairo, She works primarily with video, performance, publications, and video installation. Her work addresses the memory, history, archive, and the possibilities of tracing absence. Abuarafeh’s video and performances are text based that questions the complexity of history, how is it shaped, constructed, made, perceived, visualized and understood. And how all these elements are related to fact and fiction.

Noor recently participated In Berlin Biennale (2020), Sharjah Biennale13 (2017), Off-Binnial - Gaudipolis, Budapest (2017), Qalandia International, Jerusalem (2018), In 2019 she had her first solo show “The Moon is a Sun Returning as a Ghost” in Jerusalem that is curated by Lara Khaldi.

Am I the ageless object at the museum? 2017
14:59 mins
Video and mixed media Installation

Am I the ageless object at the museum? is based on a narrative that is written in parallel with several visits to different zoos and zoologies in Palestine, Switzerland and Egypt. The film is the last episode of a long term project, in which each of these episodes deal with the concept of the museum from a different perspective. It deals with the construction of the zoo and its historical relation to the museum, and the relation between museums and cemeteries. Where the three of these components are related to the discipline of history and present it in very similar aesthetics.

The video is based on a narrative that is written in parallel with several visits to different zoos around the world. It is the last episode of a long term project, in which each deals with the concept of the museum from a different perspective, and construction of the zoo and its historical relation to the museum, and the relation between museums and cemeteries.

Yazan Khalili

Yazan Khalili lives and works in and out of Palestine. He is an architect, visual artist, educator, and cultural producer. He is co-founder of Radio Alhara. His works have been exhibited in several major solo and collective exhibitions, including at KW, Berlin (2020); MoCA-Toronto (2020); New Photography, MoMA (2018). Currently he is a Phd candidate at Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, a guest artist resident at Rijksakademie, and the co-chair of photography discipline at the MFA program at Bard, NY.

All the images looked real, 2019.
6:42 min

The video stems out of a long engagement in Khalili’s practice with the question of the archive in the digital age. Not any archive, but an archive of a calamity. The questions addressed in the work are concerned with the exhibition of the material corpse of a catastrophe as evidence, as the undeniable truth. Would it be more appropriate in order to save the memory of this catastrophe to hide its material evidence and tell the stories orally? Where these stories mutate and are combined with ongoing catastrophes. Potentially, the digital archive could be the medium with which this happens; through the dispersal of copies and their endless modification, memory is emancipated from the narrative of the institution. The existence of the archive in cyberspace reveals its fictive character.

In the video, the desktop becomes the landscape which the camera shoots and manoeuvres in. We only see the image of the world as mediated by the screen. The video attempts to reveal this mediated image, we see the image of the image, until we are unsure if there is an ‘original’ image of the world. The form which the video takes works hand in hand with the issue of the copy that is addressed.

Dina Mimi

Dina Mimi (B.1994, Jerusalem) is a visual artist Her practice is multifaceted and uses video, sound, performance, and text. Dina has been researching issues and subjects regarding the body and death in the public sphere, and notions of visibility and invisibility in the relationship of archaeology to the object, and the museum to death. She has also been researching protest as a performance. Dina obtained her Bachelor’s degree from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Palestine in 2016, and MFA degree in art in the public sphere from ECAV (École cantonal d’art du Valais) in Switzerland in 2018 and currently at De Ateliers Residency in Amsterdam.

The eyes that never see, 2021
11:47 min

The eyes that never see, is a short film that narrates a reputation of the images, names, and death of a lonely man that is often forgotten, but he kept coming back. A story of a man from the working class, simple yet complex in unfolding the obsessions of a settler state, such as excavation; the act of digging the ground to find artifacts, in a country that erases history to create a new one. The names never appear, and what is taken out is barely seen. What is wanted to be revealed is what adds into the ultra myths within the system of the occupation.

Ram(z)i is a man who died twice -
Once after his first body died and he was named again. The other was under a dusty ground in Jerusalem, while digging for artifacts of a 6000 years old ancient city.

Amani Yacoub

Amani Yacoub (b.1991) is an artist and cultural practitioner based in Ramallah. She is a graduate of the International Academy of Art Palestine and more recently the Homeworks Academy 2020. She has worked at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, and was recently awarded a grant from AFAC for Camouflaged Narratives.

Behind the photograph: How I became part of the scene, 2018
15:30 min
Lecture performance and video installation

The work explores social media and 3G mobile telephone technology in particular, which was activated in the West Bank at the beginning of 2018. The project addresses the relationship between mass media, surveillance, and the struggle for emancipation in Palestine. While social media in Palestine disseminates live events and incites the masses to join them, it simultaneously invites passive participation. Alarmingly, these platforms reveal what is intended to be concealed, in situations where exposures are tied to carceral logics and interrogation. In the lecture performance, Yacoub examined situations whereby theconcealed and revealed are masked and contradictory to the Palestinian political landscape.