Screenings

Around Exposure 2013 Video Screening at Beirut Art Center

Wednesday, Nov 13, 2013
8:00pm -> 9:30pm
Wednesday, Nov 20, 2013
8:00pm -> 9:30pm
Beirut Art Center

Beirut Art Center is pleased to present a selection of videos produced by artists participating in Exposure 2013.

Monira Al Qadiri

Wa Waila (Oh Torment), 2008, 10 minutes, Arabic with English subtitles
A surreal film based on an old Kuwaiti folk song, whose words are almost like a trance of recurring tragedy and self-pity. The lyrics of the song are visually interpreted to create a music-video like atmosphere. It depicts love lost, displacement, gender identity, and death in a poetic, but also kitsch style. The men and women in the film are all in opposite roles, and the artists plays the part of the main male singer.

Abu Athiyya (Father of Pain), 2013, 6 minutes, Arabic with English subtitles
A music video based on a Mawwal song performed by the southern Iraqi singer Yas Khodhor. The artist plays the role of the singer in a ghost-like funerary setting, and performs a knife dancing ritual to the choreography of the legendary Iraqi gypsy dancer Malayeen. The video embodies a kind of eulogy towards the aesthetics of sadness – a prominent form of aesthetic appreciation in the region – that is rapidly dying away.

Rumors of Affluence, 2012, 6 minutes, Arabic with English subtitles
Rumors of Affluence is a short video experiment that attempts to illustrate the historical and cultural tradition of corruption and excessive affluence in Kuwait, through the use of rumors as the main subject matter.

Shirin Abu Shaqra

Conversations With Changes, 2010, 12 minutes, Arabic. Production Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporain
It is a journey in an imaginary city; a heterotopia within which one comes acrossfragments of events away from History books, parts of lives too small to figure in oral History, too small even to figure in the never written History of losers.

Rozenn Quéré

Un homme envolé , 2009, 14:46 minutes, French with English subtitles. Scénario: Perrine Lottier. Photos: Rozenn Quéré
One day, Jean doesn’t come back from work. His wife, Zillah, first thinks that he had an accident. She starts to look for him. She mentally rebuilds him little by little, through her imagination and memories.

Maha Kays

Zaki Amer, 2011, 9 minutes,Text and subtitles in French
While dealing with the unknown past of a family member who went through the Lebanese wars, the work of the imagination, facts, and photos add more drama to the potential truth. Faced with multiple failures in the quest for “truth,” I came to the conclusion that one of the ways out lies in creating one possible story out of many others, which should redeem the person who might not have been a victim.

Chanson du septième étage, 2006-2011, 7:19 minutes, Text and subtitles in French
While trying to recreate a space, one has to acknowledge the fact that the space itself no longer exists. The following fact to face is that even if the space is recreated, it would not resemble the original one. The copy will never be certified. This is when one attempts to poetically describe life and its objects that once lived in this space by using alternative ways to animate the space, and creating out of the details a constellation that orbits around the space itself.

Helene Kazan

A Domestic Image of Insecurity – Film Montage, 2013, 20 min
Like her installation in Exposure at BAC, A Domestic Image of Insecurity – Film Montage takes the ordinary image of the domestic space and sets it against an overarching condition of threat. In the montage Kazan extracts aspects from a series of films by other filmmakers as well as herself, bringing together as a whole the everyday architecture and activities that fill our lives in a backdrop of a perceived danger or a rising tension. Kazan is interested in showing the space of the home through this condition, as it subtly transforms, from shelter to potent threat.

Entrance: 3,000 LL
Duration: Approx. 90 minutes