Space + Gaze - Events

With a focus on women’s cinema the annual Shashat film festival screens films across the West Bank and Gaza. It is the longest running film festival in Palestine and women’s film festival in the Arab World. We will be screening several shorts in conjunction with the exhibition SPACE & GAZE: Conversations with Jean Mohr & Edward Said in Palestine.

The Fig and The Olive, (Palestine 2011)

When we hear the stories of our grandparents, the topics get mixed together – imagination, reality, love, politics, struggle and dreams. Sometimes reality is more incredulous that the imagination, and the dream becomes a way to survive.

Out of Frame A film by Riham Al-Ghazali, (Palestine, 2012)

Ibaa and Rihaf are two Gazan young women who grew up dreaming of a society in which they can be part of its hopes and aspirations.‌ ‌ But the two of them clash head-on with a reality harder and more cruel than that had imagined and end up feeling ‘outside the frame’.

HUSH!, ‌(Palestine 2013)

Lamia is a girl facing social pressure to be a ‘perfect girl’, which translates into marriage, children and silence ….as if there are no other options for a girl. Anything other than that will lead to scandal and dishonor. The constant criticism of everything she does added to the constant scrutiny in a male dominant society makes things even worse for a girl whose only wish is to have a small quiet room of her own where hope exists.

Girls and The Sea, A film by Taghreed El-Azza, (Palestine 2010)

Three young Palestinian girls want to go to the beach after one of them wins a prize to stay at a hotel by the sea. They plan their trip with great enthusiasm. But they have to overcome several obstacles before they can accomplish what they want., In the end they manage to make their dream come true.

Discussant: Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths)

A Visual Sociology postgraduate professional development session in collaboration with the Methods Lab & The Mosaic Rooms.

The Mosaic Rooms and aria (artist residency in Algiers), are pleased to present Intervening Space: From The Intimate To The World. This is the first London group show of six contemporary Algerian artists, featuring newly-commissioned and reimagined works from Fayçal Baghriche, Amina Menia, Atef Berredjem, Hanan Benammar, Massinissa Selmani and Sadek Rahim.

Sadek Rahim will be in residence at The Mosaic Rooms for one month to develop a new site-specific work. Rahim’s work often intervenes in space, working site specifically to draw attention to liminal elements and invest with emotional affect. For this piece, the artist will explore the fine line which separates private from public, the outside world from the domestic interior.

Sadek Rahim is an Algerian artist whose work often combines photography and installation, technology and design. He graduated from the Fine Arts Academy of Beirut, Lebanon and holds a BA in Fine Arts from an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, London.

Rahim has exhibited widely in Algeria and internationally, including The Museum of Contemporary Art (MAMA) in Algiers, The National Museum Zabana in Oran, The Montparnasse Museum, The TalmArt gallery in Paris, The Oxford House in London, and The Alserkal Foundation in Dubai. He was also curator and co-curator with Metropolart Cities & Artists (Paris) and the French Institute (Oran) in collaborative events such Nuit Blanche Oran, The 1st Salon of Contemporary Drawing of Oran, The biennale of Contemporary Art of Oran and Video'Apart Oran.

Recently Sadek Rahim has been selected to showcase his work during the international event ''First Night Oran'' Curated by Jérôme Sans. He has also been commissioned a work for Yves Saint-Laurent's celebrations during the event ''les Journées de la Mode'' at the French Cultural Centre, Oran in 2013.

In this public conversation, Jean Mohr‌ reflects on his collaboration with Edward Said on After the Last Sky, as well as on his wider oeuvre of work.

After the Last Sky came about after Jean Mohr was commissioned by the UN, to take photos of some of the key sites in which Palestinians lived their lives. Because the UN allowed only minimal text (the names of places) to accompany the photographs, Said and Mohr decided to work together on an 'interplay', as Said put it, of Said's personal account of Palestinian suffering and exile and Mohr's photographs – 'an unconventional, hybrid, and fragmentary [form] of expression' - which they called After the Last Sky (1986).

The Space and Gaze exhibition at Goldsmiths (September 2013 – July 2014) brings Mohr's images and Said's text from this seminal book together for the first time. Working against the grain of speeded up short durations in gallery spaces and the cultural sector more widely, we have chosen to live and converse with the images and texts for the longer duration of an academic year. Again‌st the grain of the corporatization of the academy, the exhibition claims the space for an alternative writing on the walls of the university.
 
This is Jean Mohr's second exhibition at Goldsmiths. His first, which was held in the 1970s, was titled Two portraits and a Story, and consisted of photographs of peasants in Haute Savoie, France. He is well-known for his many collaborations with John Berger, which include A Fortunate Man (1967), Art & Revolution (1969), A Seventh Man (1975), Another Way of Telling (1995) and John by Jean: fifty years of friendship (2014). More than 80 exhibitions have been dedicated to his photographic work worldwide. He has worked for numerous international organisations (UNHCR, ILO, JDC) and was ICRC delegate for the Middle East 1949-1950. In 1978 he was awarded the prize for the photographer who had contributed the most to the cause of human rights. Speaking of his position as a photographer he has stated: 'If I see a child drowning I can't take a picture of the scene. I can lend a hand or grab a stick to remove the child.' He has an interest in theatre and his large body of work also includes plasticine photography, usually in colour, as a reflection of formal experimentations in the art field.

Screening & Discussion

Produced in 1984, at the time that Edward Said and Jean Mohrwere working on After the Last Sky, the film brings Arab women’s gaze to the different times and places of women’s roles in the Palestinian struggle. It explores the personal and the political, locating women in the spaces of absence as it inserts their centrality and presence in the history of Lebanon and of Palestine. It is concerned with photography, with acts of remembering, draws on collective memory and on an Arab heritage of oral history and mosaic patterns to compose a compelling narrative structure, re-centering women in Arab history. ‘Leila and the Wolves’ has been called a feminist masterpiece.

Speakers: Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano

After the Last Sky was conceived as an effort to redress the fact that, as Said put it, 'to most people Palestinians have been visible as fighters, terrorists and lawless pariahs'. Negatively 'over-represented', yet in crucial respects invisible, the Palestinian experience of dispossession is here restored to its lived complexity, not allowing the violence of occupation to saturate the field of vision and blot out everyday life.

In this presentation, we want to reflect on how, more than a quarter century after its publication, Said and Mohr's collaboration can serve as a potent resource in addressing the politics and aesthetics of representing dispossession. In particular, we will consider how Said's recognition of the centrality of land to the dynamics of dispossession informs the composition of After the Last Sky, and how the book can provide a critical vantage point on a rich critical legal literature on settler-colonial dispossession which often risks abstracting away from lifeworlds of ownership and resistance which remain unregistered in legal frameworks.

Drawing on some of Said's writings on the visible, as well as on Allan Sekula's critical writings on the history of photography, will also try to contrast Said and Mohr's ways of seeing with different strategies for representing Palestinian dispossession and resistance, focusing in particular on three registers: reflexive or formalistic attempts to depict (armed) Palestinian struggle, from Wakamatsu and Adachi's PFLP-Japanese Red Army – Declaration of World War and Godard and Melville's Ici et Ailleurs to Ahlam Shibli's Phantom Home; documentary records of dispossession (Ariella Azoulay's From Palestine to Israel); contemporary filmic and photographic work which foregrounds the landscape or the technologies of dispossession whole leaving Palestinian experience outside the frame (Sophie Ristelheuber's West Bank).

Dialogues with Muthanna Al-Qadi

Film and discussion

Muthanna Al-Qadi presents
SHOTS THAT BIND - Palestinian Photojournalists in Nablus,
Dir. Kloie Picot
50 minutes

See the film on Vimeo or see the film on YouTube

'… an extremely interesting and important film' – Chicago Palestine Film Festival Committee.

The self-financed documentary film by independent filmmaker Kloie Picot, SHOTS THAT BIND - Palestinian Photojournalists in Nablus, follows a tight-knit group of Palestinian photojournalists as they capture the daily images of tension and grief that are the result of the Israeli occupation in Nablus and the surrounding areas of the Occupied West Bank.

Filmmaker Kloie Picot began shooting SHOTS THAT BIND after she witnessed and, by chance, filmed the clash that killed APTV cameraman Nazeh Darwazeh. For 10 months Picot shared the fear, frustration, apathy, intimidation, and injury of the photojournalists. This is an intimate and intense portrayal, which offers a rare and unique glimpse into these war photographers' lives as they struggle to document a conflict that they themselves are inescapably a part of. As the Reuters photographer Abed Qusini explains: 'When we began shooting pictures, that's when the world began to see what's really going on here.'

This film contains violent images.

Muthanna Al-Qadi's work is displayed, along with contemporary photographs of Palestine, in the exhibition Conversations with Jean Mohr and Edward Said in Palestine. Muthanna Al-Qadi is a freelance photographer from Nablus and editor of Middle East affairs at AL-QUDS newspaper (London). He has worked in a number of journalistic positions.

Discussion

Human rights observers will present visual materials to discuss how they witnessed the occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Speakers: Sophie Wickham, Dominika Blachnicka – Ciacek & Sahdya Saduf Kaiser Darr.

As the Methods Lab opens the exhibition Space & Gaze: Conversations with Edward Said and Jean Mohr in Palestine (Kingsway Corridor), staff and students from Goldsmiths’ engage with the Mosaic Gallery

Disappearance and disappearing - not only of cities, but of the state, of borders, of people - bitterly defines the particularity of Palestinian existence. One of the great Palestinian poets, Mahmoud Darwish, looking back at his life journey, described in his last set of poems the experience of constantly finding himself in the presence of his own absence. This panel session, from the Methods Lab at Goldsmiths, reflects on the different kinds of absences and presences that we have encountered as part of our work in Palestine and considers some of the challenges and responsibilities that such work raises for researchers and visual practitioners. The discussion is based on two projects: Samah Saleh will explore the absences that female Palestinian prisoners must confront in and on their return from Israeli prisons; Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek will address her encounters with the ‘ghost’ homes of exiled Palestinians. The discussion will be introduced and chaired by Mariam Motamedi-Fraser.

Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek is a visual ethnographer and PhD candidate in Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths, London, where she researches narratives of home, homeland and return amongst Palestinian exiles and their descendants and audio-visually engages with their diasporic/displacement journeys. In 2012 she served as a human rights observer in East Jerusalem. She has written for Haaretz, Gazeta Wyborcza, Arabia.pl and Liberte!

Samah Saleh is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at Goldsmiths, London. Her doctoral research is about the experience of Palestinian women’s incarceration in Israeli prisons. She is following women’s lives before, during and after imprisonment. As a women’s rights activist in Palestine she has also been involved in a research on violence against women and has worked on women rights issues in her position in An-Najah national university as a social worker and academic.

Marian Motamedi-Fraser teaches in the areas of visuality, archives, and the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences in the Sociology department at Goldsmiths. She is co-Director, with Nirmal Puwar, of the Methods Lab. Her current research interests are in the materiality of words and the feel/experience of different forms of reason. As well as her academic publications, and a novel, she has written for Jadaliyya, Ibraaz, and Sahfeh.‌