10:00 am

Projections

Cinema and moving image: Yaminay Chaudhri (artist and Co-founder, Tentative Collective), Butheina Kazim (Co-founder, Cinema Akil), Hania Mroué (Founder and Director, Metropolis Art Cinema), Filipa Ramos (Co-curator, Vdrome)
Moderator: Maha Maamoun (artist)

Panelists discuss the development of independent cinema and screening platforms in Dubai, Beirut, Karachi and online. How have these organisations both inspired and been inspired by various cultures of coming together and viewing? How have they been active in building and growing a network of audience/participants who can access films and training where these are lacking?

11:45 am

Bidayyat

Presentation: Mohammad Ali Atassi (Director, Bidayyat)

This presentation outlines the ongoing work of Bidayyat to support and produce documentary and experimental films and organise courses on documentary filmmaking. Emerging from the complex relationship between the Syrian revolution and its image, Bidayyat provides filmmakers with the support to confront stereotyped images of death and destruction and engage in a wider landscape of life, resistance, work and art.

12:00 pm

Artists talk

Manthia Diawara (University Professor and Director of the Institute of African American Affairs, New York University) in conversation with Salah Hassan (Goldwin Smith Professor and Director, Institute for Comparative Modernities, Cornell University)

Manthia Diawara speaks about the development of his intellectual and artistic trajectory with longtime colleague Salah Hassan. Diawara discusses the significance of material culture—music, poetry, visual art and film—in his approach to historiography.

1:00 pm

Lunch

2:30 pm

Conversations

John Akomfrah (artist and filmmaker) and Reem Shilleh (Co-founder, Subversive Film)
Moderator: Ala Younis (artist and curator)

Artist John Akomfrah and the Palestinian film unit Subversive Film discuss the ‘cinecultural’ and ‘cinehistoric’ spaces forged through their collective models of filmmaking. How do these two expanded approaches to working with moving image and archives—including efforts to preserve, reissue, subtitle, annotate and recontextualise history through footage—extend the lens through which we view life in the present moment?

3:30 pm

Artists talk

Ahmed Mater (artist) in conversation with Eungie Joo (Curator of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)

Ahmed Mater speaks with Eungie Joo about his practice, his work in his hometown of Abha and efforts to initiate informal gatherings among peers.

4:15 pm

Coffee break

4:30 pm

Vertigo of a sunset

Lecture performance: Mario Santanilla (artist)

Santanilla proposes a form in which structures of time, information and knowledge are questioned, shared and translated in public. The lecture performance takes shape around certain common experiences of absence, including those of the author and a linear narrative.

4:45 pm

You send me

Futurisms: Monira Al Qadiri (artist), Almagul Menlibayeva (artist), Larissa Sansour (artist), Martine Syms (artist)
Moderator: Ayesha Hameed (artist and Lecturer, Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College)

Through presentations of their work, artists on this panel engage with notions of the future with the aim of unsettling perceptions of spatio-temporal order. Displaced from the common standpoints of past and present, futurism offers the possibility of reconceptualising our presence—envisioning space-time continuums that may move us to mobilise elements of change that are already at work on the horizon.

8:30 pm

Naham – Songs of light and weight

Performance: Neo Muyanga (composer and musician)
Al Hamdan Bin Mousa Courtyard, Al Mureijah Square

The Arabic word naham in the title refers to a song leader on a pearling ship, whose role is to uplift spirits and provide comfort as the divers trawl the sea in search of pearls. Drawing on the naham’s songs and pearl divers’ stories of toil and struggle, Muyanga’s performance, the culmination of a week-long workshop project with local singers, provides a platform for hidden voices to express their stories of hope, fear and longing through movement and song.