ALL PROJECTS Shoni Mongol Adda Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum 2020 Responding to a lack of spaces for the exchange and debate of ideas in Bangladesh, the open-membership artist-led initiative Shoni Mongol Adda (Bangla for ‘Saturday Tuesday Debate Group’) was formed by inviting friends to come to a quiet local café and to pay for their own food and drink (with a little extra to jointly remunerate an invited speaker) and to engage with a different guest speaker twice a week to debate topics such as ‘What is public space?’ (with a police commissioner as a guest speaker). The platform became so successful that members of the group took over management of the restaurant, which is now known as Kamor Café, and which is walking distance from the DAS venue. Here, the collective presents a new question every day at DAS in a sign-based format for the audience to consider and debate in addas organised in the discussion area of this amoeba form. It also invites visitors to join them for addas at Komor Cafe on 8 February and 11 February when they will host artistic delegations from Nepal and Australia.

ALL PROJECTS B/DESH Curated by Deepak Ananth B/DESH is shorthand for Bangladesh, of course, but also, bidesh , the Bangla word for abroad, a foreign land, an extraterritorial elsewhere. Desh, on the other hand, designates a homeland, accompanied by a sense or semblance of a national identity, however notional or real. So the home and the world are conjoined and separated by the most tenuous of lexical and phonetic expedients: the slender slash differentiating desh and bidesh that could also be seen as a marker of everything that lies between them. And ‘in between-ness’ is, if anything, a perenially shifting ground, a provisional state that might itself be an image of that potential undifferentiation of identity and alterity, ‘self’ and ‘other’ symptomatic of the globalised present. To have a sense of rootedness and yet not be insular, to acknowledge the feeling of homelessness (the spiritual malaise par excellence of the modern condition) and find new ways of negotiating it in the face of the neutralisation of difference that is the cultural logic of globalisation - these are some of the burdens faced by those once relegated to the margins and now deemed to be ‘emerging’ on the world scene. The tragically fraught history of Bangladesh’s coming into being as a nation, the chronicle of political turmoil and violence that has marked its relatively short existence as an independent state, cannot but be salient in the consciousness of the country’s intellectuals and artists and in their attempts to make sense of the vicissitudes of the present. To be a witness to their times is for many of them an ethical stance. For artists this imperative is doubled by another, namely, the need to find the form and medium most appropriate to their vision of the reality in which they find themselves. For many years now documentary photography has proved to be particularly compelling for a range of practitioners in Bangladesh, and the subjects they have tended to focus upon would seem to demand such an approach. But often their eyes have been schooled in allegorical or conceptual ways of seeing, and questions of ‘objectivity’ that underlie the documentary stance are subtly callibrated to the degree of empathy or distance they bring to their approach, as in Shumon Ahmed’s ongoing project within the ship graveyard on the Chittagong coast, reputedly the largest in the world. For Gazi Nafis, on the other hand, the camera has been the instrument to capture intimate moments in the lives of a range of sexual minorities, in images that betoken an engaging complicity with these social outcasts. In contrast, the anthropological nature of some of the subjects explored by the Australian Bengali artist Omar Adnan Chowdhury (the juxtaposition of a Hindu and a Shia festival in old Dhaka, for example) in his large scale audio-visual installations becomes the occasion for a slow, immersive and contemplative sensory experience. For some artists working in media that are not lens-based, the fix of the real is less than imperious. The peculiar assortment of creaturely forms that people the paintings of Ronnie Ahmed, for example, are the denizens of a parallel world that is gleefully awry and somewhat hallucinatory all at the same time. The oneirism of his work couldn’t be further removed from the cool detachment that Ayesha Sultana brings to her pictorial representations of familiar urban spaces, their blank allure a façade for something verging on the uncanny. Another aspect of her work dispenses with representation altogether, the more to explore the poetics of graphic inscription and the material qualities of surface and texture. This interest in investigating the rudiments of form is shared by Rana Begum, who was born in Bangladesh but grew up in Britain. Her interest in the pristine geometry of sharply angled coloured planes (in paper or aluminium) and the ways in which these might become receptacles of light inform her sculptural practice ; her rigorous and yet sensuous abstraction hints at the subtle coalescence of the Islamic architectural ideal of emptiness as a numinous space and the pared-down unitary forms of Minimalist sculpture. The formal ‘syncretism’ of Begum’s work could be contrasted with the exercises in cultural translation and critique undertaken by the conceptual artist and writer Naeem Mohaiemen, who divides his time between Dhaka and New York. Working with photography and film, he has sought to recover and critically reframe certain key emblematic moments and events (both private and public) in the tragic history that led to independence and the creation of a sovereign state. As a writer and as an artist, Mohaiemen’s work has dwelt perceptively on the political, ideological and cultural implications of B/DESH and the complexities of its current trajectories. Artists Naeem Mohaiemen Rana Begum Omar Adnan Chowdhury Ronni Ahmed Shumon Ahmed

ALL PROJECTS Modern Art Histories in and across South Africa & South Asia Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 12 - 21 Aug 2019 The Dhaka Art Summit, Institute for Comparative Modernities(ICM) at Cornell University, and Asia Art Archive, with support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, launched a new research project entitled Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia. The project began by convening 21 emerging scholars and 5 faculty members in Hong Kong in August 2019 to begin an ongoing research project connecting art histories outside of western frameworks. This group later reconvened at DAS 2020.

ALL PROJECTS Beyond Borders May 2017 - June 2018 | Whitworth Art Gallery Yasmin Jahan Nupur Performance | A tailor is sewing the dress of Tipu Sultan 19 - 20 May 2018 Beyond borders, explored south asian textiles bringing together four artists working on issues around post-colonial identity, ruptured spaces, authenticity, displacement and belonging. Beyond Borders highlighted the changing landscape of the subcontinent in the 21st century, post independence and partition, across the Whitworth's main textile gallery. Each artist’s new work is debuted alongside textiles and/or objects from the Whitworth's textile collection. Pattern books and vibrant textiles are selected to responded and resonate with themes captured in the artist’s own creations. As part of this exhibition, there will be a special two-day performance by Bangladeshi artist, Yasmin Jahan Nupur. In this performance, Nupur used specially handwoven muslin-jamdani as a signifier of power and consumption embedded in the contested and violent history of the subcontinent. A highly revered, translucent cotton cloth from Bengal, muslin embellished with jamdani (woven pattern) has been celebrated over the centuries for its mesmerising allure and feather-light texture, often compared to moonlight or the morning dew. This fine cloth made from a labour-intensive process historically adorned the richest of rulers in the subcontinent and attracted a lucrative overseas trade. Growing up in Bangladesh Nupur was aware of how muslin had been celebrated across the world but equally, was deeply affected by the legacies and impact of British colonialism. “There are entire generations of Bengali men and women who have grown up with legendary stories of how the British cut off the thumbs of weavers so they could no longer produce muslin and were forced to buy British goods. This history constantly hurts me”. The exhibition was part of the New North and South, a network of eleven arts organisations from across the North of England and South Asia celebrating shared heritage across continents and develop artistic talent. Performance Still of A Tailor is sewing the dress of Tipu Sultan (2018). Photo courtesy: Ashley Van Dyck and Whitworth, the University of Manchester.

ALL PROJECTS A Beast, A God, And A Line Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway, 30 Nov 2019 - 8 Mar 2020 Dhaka Art Summit 2018 exhibition, A beast, a god, and a line travels to Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway for its fifth iteration, featuring many works commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation as part of exhibition's the initial edition during DAS 2018. This exhibition was organised by the Samdani Art Foundation in collaboration with Para Site, Hong Kong and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Image Courtesy: Aage A. Mikalsen/ Kunsthall Trondheim

ALL PROJECTS Planetary Planning Curated by Devika Singh In 1969 visionary architect and designer Buckminster Fuller delivered the Nehru memorial lecture, entitled ‘Planetary Planning’, in which he claimed that South Asia could be conceived as a form of axis-mundi and a cradle for all humanity. Using Fuller’s lecture as a point of departure, this exhibition explored notions of world-making that have been articulated in and from South Asia by three generations of international artists since the 1940s. Planetary thinking, pensée-monde, and worldliness are some of the concepts that have been put forward to describe globalisation as a historical process and the worldview that accompanies it. Sometimes folded into more specific geographical units (Asia, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean), trade, empire, and economic exchanges, as well as scientific innovations, have been some of its crucial vectors. Against this complex and historically unequal canvas of exchanges, but also of imaginary ‘immobile movement’ to use Edouard Glissant’s term, artists have projected alternative, at times utopian thinking, and located themselves within it. By including the works of artists whose trajectory has been marked by travel and migration, this exhibition explored how artistic itinerancy has challenged fixed identities and their inherent hierarchies. Reflecting on trade connections and aesthetic networks, the lines of transfer drawn in this exhibition examined the historical junctures and disjunctures of South Asia. They also looked back at cross-regional exchanges, for example between Bangladesh and Japan, the United States and India, from the 1940s until now. The point is one of convergence. The works that result reflect on the interconnection of geographical spaces. Some of the artists in this exhibition have sustained close relationships, while others were juxtaposed for the first time. Yet they all belong to different stages of an aesthetic exploration on line and architecture. Many exhibited artists conceive of architecture both as a bearer of place and as a language holding the possibility of worldly affiliations. Through the descriptive potential of drawing, photography and film, they probe how architectural imagination can be the repository of cultural memory and planetary planning from South Asia- ARTISTS Amie Siegel Ayesha Sultana Buckminster Fuller Desmond Lazaro Hera Büyüktaşçıyan Isamu Noguchi Lala Rukh Mohammad Kibria Muzharul Islam Novera Ahmed Seher Shah Zarina Hashmi

ALL PROJECTS Moving Image Rituals for Temporal Deprogramming: Videos, Films and Talks Programme Curated by the Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun) To use images, sounds, voices, gestures, expressions, noises, colours,spaces and silences to deprogram the inherited orders of temporality, chronology and history that seek to manage and encourage the form of the present and the fate of the future. To formulate audiovisual projects that operate as diagrams for reprogramming the parameters of the present. To intervene in the timelines of the present in order to hack the lines of time. To be guided by an imagination of the future that works on and in and through the present. These impulses, intimations and imperatives subtend the works of the artists selected by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Group for Rituals for Temporal Deprogramming. Works by Ayo Akingbade, Hadel Assali, Taysir Batniji, Tony Cokes, Esi Eshun, Black Quantum Futurism, Mohammed Harb, Louis Henderson, Onyeka Igwe, Salman Nawati, Ana Pi, Morgan Quaintance, Alfred Santana, Rania Stephan, Sharif Waked and Rehana Zaman can be understood as rituals for the deprogramming of time, reprogramming in time and programming with time. Rites that aim to bring viewers face to face with the violence of images and the threat of sounds so as to intervene in the foreclosures of colonial time and racial space. Rituals for Temporal Deprogramming includes conversations with invited artists and theorists. The videos directed by Hadel Assali, Taysir Batniji, Mohammed Harb, Salman Nawati and Sharif Waked were programmed by Jasbir Puar and Francesco Sebregondi for the installation Future Lives of Return, 2019, and commissioned by Sharjah Architecture Triennial. Alfred Santana Alfred Santana is an independent filmmaker and photographer with numerous award-winning documentaries, public affairs films and videos that have aired on both network and public television. Mr. Santana’s production company, Al Santana Productions, produces documentary, narrative and experimental work for television, the web and theatrical presentation. The company also produces industrial and corporate videos. Voices of the Gods examines the Akan and Yoruba religions, two West African traditions practiced within the United States today. It looks at their cosmologies, their use of music, dance and medicine in various ceremonies and rituals. The film includes contemporary and historical examples of the influences of these religions in secular African-American culture, which in turn influenced mainstream American society, more through culture than religion, and in some ways, even politics. Ana Pi Ana Pi is an artist working with image and choreography, a contemporary dancer and pedagogue, a researcher-lecturer performer on peripheral dances and she also collaborates on projects of various kinds. NOIRBLUE opens space to fiction and an atlantic navigation of some peripheral bodies. This exercise interrogates presence, absence, speeches and time to produce an extemporary dance aligned to two specific colors: the blackness of the skin and the ultramarine blue pigment. Ayo Akinbade Ayo Akingbade is a British Nigerian artist and filmmaker who has produced a number of acclaimed artist films exploring the contemporary Black experience in London particularly in relation to housing. She is an alumnus of Sundance Ignite and New Contemporaries. The future of social housing is threatened by the AC30 Housing Bill. Dear Babylon is set in London’s East End, a trio of art students are eager to raise awareness about their neighbourhood, especially the lives of tenants and people who work on the estate. Dear Babylon, 2019, 21 min. Courtesy of the filmmaker Set in 1985 and the present day, So They Say (2019, 11 min) explores and reflects on the often forgotten histories of black and brown community struggle in the East London borough of Newham. Street 66 (2018, 13 min) chronicles the life of Ghanaian housing activist Dora Boatemah and her influence on the regeneration of Angell Town Estate in Brixton, South London. Dr. Theodora Boatemah MBE was born in Kumasi, Ghana in 1957, where her mother worked in President Kwame Nkrumah’s cabinet. In 1987, she founded the Angell Town Community Project and campaigned for the community-controlled regeneration of the Angell Town Estate in Brixton. Dora was awarded an MBE in 1994 for services to the community in Brixton and received an honorary doctorate from Oxford Brookes University in 1996. Dora died in 2001 at the age of 43. Black Quantum Futurism Black Quantum Futurism Collective is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips exploring the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalised communities through an alternative temporal lens. BQF Collective has created a number of community-based events, experimental music projects, performances, exhibitions, zines, and anthologies of experimental essays on space-time consciousness. Like politics and the weather, all time is local. Considering time’s intimate relationship to space and locality, this text, video, and object series continues the work of BQF in recovering and amplifying historical memory of autonomous Black communal space-times in North Philadelphia, meditating on the complex, contested temporal and spatial legacies of historical, liberatory Black futurist projects based primarily in North Philadelphia, such as Progress Aerospace Enterprises, Zion Gardens, and Berean Institute. All Time is Local, 2019, 5 min. Courtesy of the filmmaker Time Travel Experiments (Experimental Time Order) (2017, 9:30 min) documents experiments from an embedded time travel manual in the speculative fiction book Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales), written and published by Rasheedah Phillips. The depicted time travel experiments employ the concept of Black Grandmother Paradoxes, which emphasise matrilineal or matri-curvature timelines that are feminine and communally-generated, where the future emerges into the past by way of omens, prophecies, and symbols, while the past is a space of open possibility, speculation, and active revision by multiple generations of people situated in the relative future. Black Quantum Futurism Black Quantum Futurism Collective is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips exploring the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalised communities through an alternative temporal lens. BQF Collective has created a number of community-based events, experimental music projects, performances, exhibitions, zines, and anthologies of experimental essays on space-time consciousness. Like politics and the weather, all time is local. Considering time’s intimate relationship to space and locality, this text, video, and object series continues the work of BQF in recovering and amplifying historical memory of autonomous Black communal space-times in North Philadelphia, meditating on the complex, contested temporal and spatial legacies of historical, liberatory Black futurist projects based primarily in North Philadelphia, such as Progress Aerospace Enterprises, Zion Gardens, and Berean Institute. Time Travel Experiments (Experimental Time Order) (2017, 9:30 min) documents experiments from an embedded time travel manual in the speculative fiction book Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales), written and published by Rasheedah Phillips. The depicted time travel experiments employ the concept of Black Grandmother Paradoxes, which emphasise matrilineal or matri-curvature timelines that are feminine and communally-generated, where the future emerges into the past by way of omens, prophecies, and symbols, while the past is a space of open possibility, speculation, and active revision by multiple generations of people situated in the relative future. Black Quantum Futurism Visual Astrolabe (2015, 7:07 min) focuses on the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism, an astrolabe known as the first computer, that was recovered in 82 fragments from a sunken shipwreck off the island of Antikythera around 1900. Although it is widely believed to have been constructed by a Greek astronomer around 100 BCE, this origin story has not been confirmed. No other such technologically complex artifact appeared anywhere in Europe until the late 14th century. In 2015 AD, BQF Theorists unearthed rare, previously unseen records and unheard sound clips claiming to detail the true origins of the mechanism as designed and constructed by a secret society in ancient Ifriqiyah as a device for time displacement. On the occasion of the 50 year anniversary of the enactment of the United States Fair Housing Act, Black Space Agency Training Video (2018, 4:09 min) explores the chronopolitical imaginaries of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements during the space race, particularly as it unfolded in North Philadelphia in 1968. The series follows the pattern of entanglements in the fight for affordable and fair housing, displacement/space/land grabs, and gentrification for a better understanding of its present day implications on Black spatial-temporal autonomy. Futurist Garvey // Gravity WAVES Sound Image Study (2016, 2:42 min) represents one example of futurity in the Black diaspora, which predates the coining of the term afrofuturism. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Black Star Line envisioned the future of Black Americans as a return, by ship, to Africa, and took practical steps to create an alternative economy to achieve these goals. Imagine how different the course of history would be, had the Black Star Line succeeded with its stated mission. On the other hand, one can see the spread of the Garveyite waves of gravity, his impact on the future of Black America-to-come, as a catalyst and inspiration for other Black resistance movements, with an influence in name and philosophy capable of binding space-time. Esi Eshun Esi Eshun’s work encompasses poetry, performance and music making and has been presented across a number of platforms including Norway’s 2018 Radio Space Borealis Festival, Resonance FM and Wave Farm FM, and at live venues including Iklectik, New River Studios and The Intimate Space. Unfolding through a series of enigmatic tableaux, told through the artist’s poetry, voice, field recordings and improvised score, The Beast (2018, 8 min) takes the listener on a dreamlike journey through myth, collective memory and fable, to a place where dark undercurrents linking the city of London, the West African coast, muck, gold and Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial classic, The Wretched of the Earth, coincide. Francesco Sebregondi Francesco Sebregondi is an architect and a researcher, whose work explores the intersections of violence, technology, and the urban condition. He is a researcher and project coordinator at the independent research agency Forensic Architecture, as well as the co-editor of Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg Press, 2014). His current research examines the architecture of the Gaza blockade. Hadeel Assali Hadeel Assali is a Palestinian-American filmmaker, writer, and currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Columbia University. She created several experimental short films centered around the Gaza Strip, which have been screened in several small film festivals, academic conferences, and art exhibitions. Assali is currently working on her first feature-length documentary. Daggit Gaza is a play on translation, as the spicy tomato salad made in Gaza (called daggah) also means ‘the pounding of Gaza’. Preparation happens whilst a phone conversation between Houston and Gaza serves as voiceover commentary. Jasbir Puar Jasbir Puar is a queer theorist and Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Puar is the author of award-winning books Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) and The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017). She has written widely on South Asian disaporic cultural production in the United States, United Kingdom and Trinidad, LGBT tourism, terrorism studies, surveillance studies, biopolitics and necropolitics, disability and debilitation, theories of intersectionality, affect, and assemblage; animal studies and posthumanism, homonationalism, pinkwashing, and the Palestinian territories. Louis Henderson Louis Henderson is a filmmaker who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Developing an archaeological method in cinema, his films explore the sonic space of images, geologic time, haunted landscapes and voices within archives. Wandering from a study of the handwritten memoirs of Toussaint Louverture in the French National Archives to his prison cell in the Jura mountains in which they were written, Bring Breath to the Death of Rocks proposes an archaeology of the colonial history of France buried within its landscapes and institutions. If stratigraphy is the writing of strata, here we have a reading of this strata in which the fossilised history of Louverture can be brought to life through a geologic haunting. The film dramatises the escape of Louverture’s ghost from his castle prison (through the body of a young Haitian researcher) into a form of marronage and errantry within the fields of snow and a dark baroque-like cave. The film offers what Glissant described in the introduction to his play Monsieur Toussaint as ‘a prophetic vision of the past’. We hear an echo, a spiral retelling. Mohamed Harb Mohammed Harb was born in Gaza and graduated from Al Najah University, Nablus, with a BA in Fine Arts in 2001. He is a member of the Palestinian Association of Fine Artists and since 2003 has been working as a director at the Palestine satellite TV channel in Gaza. Harb has also participated in many local, regional and international exhibitions, festivals and workshops, in Europe and the Arab world. He lives and works in Gaza. Light From Gaza is a meditation on the waxing and waning of access to light and other daily necessities due to the titration of electricity in Gaza. Morgan Quaintance Morgan Quaintance is a London-based writer, musician, broadcaster and curator. His moving-image work has been shown recently at LIMA, Amsterdam, Cubitt Gallery, London; Jerwood Space, London; the 14th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, London Film Festival 2018, and November Film Festival. Bataaxalu Ndakaaru (Letter from Dakar) surveys aspects of the vibrant grassroots arts and culture scene in the Senegalese capital of Dakar. Highlighting the difference between the openness and innovation of community run spaces versus the staid professionalism of established galleries and museums, the film offers the first critical look at the much touted Museum of Black Civilisations. Another Decade (2018, 26:50 min) combines archive and found footage from the 1990s, with recently shot 16mm film and standard definition video. Focusing on testimonies and statements made by artists, theorists and cultural producers that are still pertinent over two decades later, the film is propelled by the sense reality that very little socio-cultural or institutional change has taken place in the United Kingdom. While recent attention paid to the ’90s casts a largely apolitical and monocultural view over the decade, the work seeks to exhume evidence buried in the shallow grave of cultural amnesia of another, more political, iconoclastic, and confrontational decade that promised a future still yet to arrive. Onyeka Igwe Onyeka Igwe works between cinema and installation. Her research-based practice uses dance, voice, archive and text to expose a multiplicity of narratives exploring the physical body and geographical place as contested sites of cultural and political meaning. This is a story of the artist’s grandfather, the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria –retold at a single point in time, in a single place. The artist is trying to tell a truth in as many ways as possible. The Names Have Changed tells us the same story in four different ways: a folktale of two brothers rendered in the broad, unmodulated strokes of colonial British moving images; a Nollywood TV series, on VHS, based on the first published Igbo novel; a story of the family patriarch, passed down through generations; and the diary entries from the artist’s first solo visit to her family’s hometown. Rania Stephan Rania Stephan has directed videos and creative documentaries notable for their play with genres, and the long-running investigation of memory, identity, archeology of image and the figure of the detective. Anchored in the turbulent reality of her country, her documentaries give a personal perspective to political events. She gives raw images a poetic edge, filming chance encounters with compassion and humour. The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni is a rapturous elegy to a rich era of film production in Egypt, lapsed today, through one of its most revered actress: Soad Hosni, who from the 1960 into the 1990s, embodied the modern Arab woman in her complexity and paradoxes. Pieced exclusively from VHS footage of films starring Soad Hosni, the film is constructed as a tragedy in three acts where the actress tells her dreamed life story. Irreverent, playful, marvellous, serious, the film proposes a singular rewriting of a golden period of Egyptian cinema, enacted by an exceptional artist, tragic star, symbol of modern Arab womanhood. Entirely taken from an old Egyptian science fiction film The Master of Time (1987) about an illuminated scientist wanting to extend human life, Threshold (2018, 11:30 min) is built on the intuition that if this science fiction film were emptied of all its fictional elements, retaining only the transition shots featuring doors, gates and boundary crossings, The Master of Time would reveal its quintessence: its obsession with eternity and the extension of time. Here, the science fiction experience is doubled. This new condensed version of The Master of Time lies on the threshold of fiction and abstraction, narration and experimentation, cinema and art. Double Cross (2018, 3:40 min) reduces the intricate labyrinth of Threshold into an infernal drama of entrance and exit that condenses space and time into an infernal loop of crossing, recrossing and re-recrossing. Double Cross is Rania Stephan’s profound meditation on the power of montage: an ode to the plot twist and the fatal destiny of film noir enacted in the eternal passage from illumination to occlusion. Memories of a Private Eye (2015, 30:35 min) is the first chapter in a trilogy which investigates the filmmaker’s personal archive. Evoking the language of film noir, it foregrounds a fictional detective to help unfold deep and traumatic memories. The film spirals around a lost image: the only moving image of the filmmaker’s dead mother. How is absence lived? What remains of love, war and death with the passing of time? These are the questions that are delicately displayed for contemplation. Weaving together images from different sources (private archive, history of the cinema, television, you-tube) while investigating the past, the film unfolds into a labyrinthic maze to create a blueprint of remembrance itself. Rehana Zaman Rehana Zaman is based in London, working with moving image and performance. Her work considers the interplay of multiple social dynamics that constitute subjects along particular socio-political formations. These narrative based pieces, often deadpan and neurotic, are frequently generated through conversation and collaboration with others. How Does an Invisible Boy Disappear? emerges from a nine-month collaboration with Liverpool Black Women Filmmakers, a new women’s film collective made up of young women from Somali and Pakistani backgrounds. The film documents the group as they work together to create a thriller focusing on a teenage girl’s attempt to find a missing local boy. Comprised of candid footage captured during the workshop process, behind-the-scenes filming and archive footage of antiracist organising in the aftermath of the Toxteth race riots, the film questions how modes of representation and societal structures are gendered and racialised. Your Ecstatic Self (2019, 31:50 min) is a conversation unfolding in a car with Sajid, the artist’s brother. As the journey progresses Sajid discusses his engagement with the philosophy and practice of Tantra, having spent the majority of his 44 years as a strict Sunni Pakistani Muslim. Placing the idiosyncrasies of western fetishism towards eastern philosophical traditions alongside cultural orthodoxies and ancestral knowledge, Your Ecstatic Self takes up multifaceted expressions of desire, intimacy and sexual agency. Salman Nawati Salman Nawati was born in Gaza in 1987. He works as a Coordinator of Plastic Art in Qattan Centre for the Child. In 2011 he worked as a lecturer in the Department of Painting within the Faculty of Fine Art at Al-Aqsa University, Gaza. His works were shown in group exhibitions internationally. Port Hour shows the artist’s vexed relationship with the Gaza port, where he struggles with the sea which acts as both freedom and barrier. Scenario (2013, 2:43 min) is a meditation on movement, and an oblique reference to maiming. Sharif Waked Sharif Waked was born in Nazareth in 1964. He studied Fine Art and Philosophy at Haifa University, Israel between 1983 and 1986. His work critically engages the prejudices, propaganda, and institutional violence that inform Middle Eastern politics. By creating striking juxtapositions between the representations of Arabs and Islam in the media and injustices experienced in reality. Waked reveals the ways that power, politics, and aesthetics are powerfully inscribed on the surface of everyday life. In 2009, two donkeys were transformed into zebras in Gaza by an entrepreneur whose zoo was badly damaged in the Israeli incursion earlier that year. The aftermath of this cross-dressing of species is the subject of Bath Time, where a donkey takes a good shower after a long day saturated with the spectator’s gaze and laughter at the Gaza Zoo. Taysir Batniji Taysir Batniji was born in Gaza and lives and works in Paris. Since the 1990s Batniji has worked mainly with video and photography, two ‘light’ mediums that fit with a career which has involved much travelling to and from between Palestine and Europe. He documents Palestinian reality in a physically vivid, anti-spectacular way by focusing on displacement, intermediate states, and the inhibition of movement. These objective issues which are part and parcel of the social, political and cultural context in Palestine also reflect the position of the artist as a witness and contributor to the life of his country, but also the Western art scene. Transit presents a silent slideshow, made up of photographic images, taken at border passages between Egypt and Gaza, reflecting the passing of time and the difficult and often impossible conditions of mobility for today’s Palestinians. Tony Cokes Tony Cokes investigates identity and opposition through reframing and repositioning. He questions how race and gender influence the construction of subjectivities, and how they are perceived through ‘representational regimes of image and sound’ as perpetuated by Hollywood, the media and popular culture. His assemblages consist of archival footage, media images, text commentary, and pop music. Face Value can be said to have started with a short text that Cokes was asked to write prior to the American release of Lars von Trier’s Manderlay in 2006. At the time he decided to focus his commentary on one section of the film the end credits featuring the David Bowie song Young Americans. The text was not published, but while writing it a friend informed him of some quotations from David Bowie that seemed to be relevant to it. When in 2011 he had an opportunity to publish a portion of the text in a new context, another friend and colleague suggested some then recent quotations from von Trier himself that might relate to the project. What started as a long epigraph to a text became a sequence of images. The text in Evil 12 (edit B) Fear, Spectra and Fake Emotions, (2009, 11:43 min) is excerpted from Brian Massumi’s essay Fear (The Spectrum Said), which discusses the Bush Administration’s terror alert colorcoding system as a method to modulate public affect via media representation. The insertion of a soundtrack by Modeselektor with uncanny vocals from Paul St. Hilaire (remixed by Dabrye) seeks to double (ghost) and thereby underline the point of Massumi’s complex media textual analysis. Mikrohaus, or the Black Atlantic? (2006–2008, 31:07 min) presents transcribed text interviews set to music. The project was inspired by the writing of music critic Philip Sherburne, who coined the term “Micro House’ to describe the conjuncture of minimal techno and house music tropes in the early 21st century. Central to the video’s intent is foregrounding how black pop cultural forms are consumed and then redeployed to produce hybrid interventions in today’s global contexts. The work also features fragmented interviews with German techno/ house producers framed by the comments of Detroit techno artists discussing the relation between their practices, which reference Afro-American musical traditions, and questions of racial politics, perception, and identity.

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