Wednesday, 11 December 2024, 14:00–15:30
Screening of films by Monica Basbous and conversation between the filmmaker and Nadim Choufi.
It Felt Like We Were Making History:
A Focus on Shuruq Harb
“It felt like we were making history” the voiceover narrates in Shuruq Harb’s film The White Elephant. This phrase is emblematic of Harb’s practice as her works emphasize the feeling of living through history rather than history itself.
Through dreams, freefall, hypnotizing shots, and trance as a state but also as a music genre, Shuruq Harb gives center stage to what traditional documentary doesn’t – the haze of narrating an ongoing experience without a clear beginning, middle, or end. In Harb’s work, the experience is growing up and living in Palestine under occupation.
The two films presented in this screening The Jump (2021) and The White Elephant (2018) showcase Harb’s versatility in filmmaking from a found footage coming-of-age documentary to a fictional film based on the events of a Palestinian man’s jump into the Mediterranean. Throughout the films, the haze of narration sticks. It sticks true, rather than sticking to the truth, as a space to narrate affective registers without othering your experience to become digestible for a broader audience.
The screening of Shuruq Harb’s two films The Jump (2021) and The White Elephant (2018) will be followed by a conversation between the artist and Nadim Choufi.
The Jump by Shuruq Harb
2021, 4K video, 10 minutes
The Jump explores the psychological terrains of leaping into the void, its potential sense of cosmic freedom, physical thrill, suspension and definitive end. Set within the tectonic rift of the Jordan Valley, the film is narrated by a robotic voice that guides us through dizzying shots of the landscape while speculating the conditions surrounding a Palestinian man’s jump into the Mediterranean. The two other main protagonists of the films – author, professor of literature Wafa Darwish, and psychologist and trauma healer Laila Atshan – reflect on their own experiences of seeking freedom and overcoming the limitations of their respective disabilities, while also offering insight into the meaning and motive behind the man’s possible suicide. The Jump unfolds like a visual poem that suspends the viewer into another worldly space, equally hypnotizing in its affects, alienating in its details, and emotionally compelling in its reflection.
The White Elephant by Shuruq Harb
2018, video, 12 minutes
Using images shared on the Internet by Israeli soldiers during the Gulf War, the first Intifada and trance music gatherings, Shuruq Harb composes the portrait of a Palestinian teenager in the 1990s, in the mirror of Israeli pop culture.
Shuruq Harb is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, filmmaker, and writer based in Ramallah. On the occasion of the Busan Biennale (2024), she presented the first iteration of “Off You Shore Paper Trail”, a collaborative film project with Federica Bueti which looks at modern maritime histories, piracy, and mobility in the Mediterranean Sea. At the center of her upcoming exhibition, “Interrupted Futures (2025)” at KH Oslo is the installation of “Al-Mashrou”, a film developed with architectural historian Nadi Abusaada revisiting the conflicted legacies of the Arab Development Society (ADS) in the Jordan Valley.
Nadim Choufi is a visual artist. Primarily through sculpture and film, he explores how concepts of progress become alluring and the ways they materialize in people, land, and objects that live through or under their definitions. He uses notions of desire and hybridity from visual and literary practices to trespass categories of development that are often unquestioned.
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