Sharjah Art Foundation

Sharjah Biennial 16

Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
6 Febuary — 15 June 2025

That Which Is Coming and the Signs of Remarkable History, 2014

Maryam Kashani
That Which Is Coming and the Signs of Remarkable History, 2014
Digital video, colour
100 minutes
English/Arabic/Spanish with English and Arabic subtitles
Film still

Synopsis

That Which Is Coming... considers time, text, and place amongst Muslim students and teachers in and around the emergent Zaytuna College in Northern California. The film juxtaposes portraits of students and teachers reading, reciting, or teaching texts with the landscapes, spaces, and sounds that shape everyday urban and suburban Muslim lives.

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Director

Maryam Kashani is a Chicago and St. Louis-based filmmaker and scholar. Her films and videos consider public and private histories and possible futures in relationship to landscape and texts. Producing 'moving portraits' of individuals, families, buildings, and transportation infrastructures, she explores time’s passage, how modes of movement and improvisation in everyday life intersect with structures of power, knowledge, economy, and representation. She is currently involved in the Zaytuna Project, a series of videos and installation work produced in conjunction with her ethnographic monograph on Zaytuna College (Berkeley, California) and the knowledge practices of Muslims in the United States. Her previous films have screened at festivals, museums, and universities internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Pacific Film Archive, and the Hammer Museum. She received her MFA in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts in 2003 and her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Texas, Austin, in 2014. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.

b. 1977, San Francisco, California