Perpetual Recurrences

Reem Shilleh, 2016, 60′

Multiple languages English subtitles

Perpetual Recurrences is an exercise in programming films. Rather than curating a selection of entire films, this exercise curates a selection of scenes. Though they are montaged, the core of the exercise is to look at recurring patterns in Palestinian cinema and cinema on Palestine. The selected scenes gather around each other to form sequences. They do this dictated by repetitive occurrences be that location, political discourse, mise-en-scene, an object and so on. From the classroom, to militants in an open field delivering a speech with a tree somewhere in sight, to handheld camera shots in tight alleyways of refugee camps, to travelling shots from inside cars moving through streets, checkpoints and landscape, the scenes are plucked out from their heavily politicised filmic contexts, form and content wise. When placed in sequences they are screened to observe the political canopy of the moving image produced in and about Palestine over the past decades.

O, Persecuted

Basma Alsharif, 2014, 11’38”

Courtesy of the Artist and Imane Farès Galerie.

“In O, Persecuted, Alsharif offers an occluded view of the restoration of Kassem Hawal’s 1974 work of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine agitprop, Our Small Houses, before launching into a rapid-fire montage of decadent Israeli party photos, set to a pounding gabba soundtrack. Despairing at the contrast between the certainties of the past and those of present, Alsharif suggests an effort to shatter the former through the recapitulation of the latter.”

Colin Beckett for the Brooklyn Rail