Rasha Salti
CuratorRasha Salti is a researcher, writer, and curator of art and film. She lives and works between Beirut and Berlin. Salti co-curated several film programs for institutions dedicated to art and film, including the Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Jeu de Paume museum. She also worked as a programmer for several film festivals, including the Abu Dhabi International Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. Since 2017, she is the commissioning editor for La Lucarne at ArteFrance, a program dedicated to experimental documentary. Her curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide including the MACBA (Barcelona), the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Santiago de Chile), and the Sursock Museum in Beirut.
Water Has Memory, 2018
Meera Devidayal, India 8 minutesInspired from Walter Benjamin’s prophetic words, that our contemporary reality is “a noisy humanity infatuated with its own grandeur, believing itself to be the universe, and living in its own prison”, the video is a critical meditation on the world of the Anthropocene that wants to provoke reconsiderations of our place in the universe.
Written and directed by: Meera Devidayal
Cinematography: Meera Devidayal and Ajay Noronha
Editor: Rikhav Desai
Sound: Mohanda V.P.
Born in Delhi, Meera Devidayal earned a degree in English literature in Mumbai and has lived there since. Since 1975, she has pursued a career in the arts, chiefly as a painter, but her practice also includes photography and video.
Jordão, 2020
Gian Spina, Brazil/Palestine/Jordan 25:01 minutesUsing satellite imagery, archival documents and contemporary footage of the River Jordan, Gian Spina’s short film reveals how the river has been perceived and represented throughout centuries, and how it has been instrumentalized in the invention of myths, religions, rituals and identities and served to perpetuate colonial imaginaries. Blending different voices that speak in various languages, stitching facts from ancient times and from the present, the film’s narrative structure draws a tribute to the river as a liquid monument.
Written, directed and edited by Gian Spina
Cinematography: Nuno Cassola
Sound: Pedro Santiago
Voice-over: Bayan Kiwan, Noor el-Abded, Gian Spina
Produced by Rodrigo Brum
Born in São Paulo, Gian Spina is a writer, researcher and artist. Has taught at the International Art Academy (Palestine), Escola da Cidade (Brazil), the Ionion Center for Arts and Culture (Greece) among other institutions. He also participated in several residency programs including Documenta 14 in Athens, the MMAG Foundation in Jordan, and the Gegenwarte/Presences in Germany. He lives in Cairo now and teaches at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Science.
Dialogue with the Unseen, 2019
Valerio Rocco Orlando, Italy/Palestine 23:36 minutesPondering their individual connections to faith, nature and society against the sound of their steps resonating like a metronome, Saleh Bakri converses with poetess Asmaa Azaizeh and DJ Eisa Khalifa respectively, as they traverse different landscapes, the desert-like scape of Maktesh Ramon, the remains of old Haifa and the rural hills facing Nazareth. Intended as a video installation that meditates the meanings of belonging to a land or a place, Dialogue with the Unseen is the fruit of years of the artist’s engagement with the question of Palestine and of his complicity with Saleh Bakri.
Written by Valerio Rocco Orlando and Saleh Bakri
Directed by Valerio Rocco Orlando
Cinematography: Ziad Bakri
Edited by Valerio Rocco Orlando
Sound: Firas Shehadeh
Cast: Saleh Bakri, Asmaa Azaizeh, Eisa Khalifa
Valerio Rocco Orlando (1978) is an artist who teaches Multimedia Dramaturgy at the Brera Academy in Milan. He has collaborated with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, composer Michael Nyman, artists Gilbert & George, Ugo Rondinone and Liam Gillick, jazz singer Amalia Grè, supermodel Eva Riccobono, actors Saleh Bakri, Alba Rohrwacher and psychoanalyst Luigi Zoja. His solo exhibitions include: “Dialogue with the Unseen”, A. M. Qattan Foundation (Ramallah, 2019) and Museo delle culture (Milan, 2019); “Portami al Confine”, Museo della Scultura Contemporanea (Matera, 2016); “What Education for Mars?”, Museo Marino Marini (Florence, 2015); “The Sphere of the Between”, Korea Foundation (Seoul, 2015); “The Reverse Grand Tour”, La Galleria Nazionale, Rome, 2013; “Lover’s Discourse”, Momenta Art (New York, 2010). He has also participated in the Bienal Internacional de Arte SIART Bolivia, (La Paz, 2018) and XI Bienal de La Habana, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam (Havana, 2012).
untitled part 9: this time, 2020
Jayce Salloum, Canada/Afghanistan 6:13 minutesIn 2008, Jayce Salloum was filming the pupils at Laisa-e-Aali Zukoor, a school built by Western troops in rural Bamiyan (Afghanistan), when to conclude each filming session he asked each one to tell a joke or sing a song. Months later, after he received the translated transcript of the interviews, he realized that they were retelling stories of Mulla Nasruddin, a Sufi wise-fool, trickster-like figure whose stories have survived centuries. Salloum was familiar with these stories, recommended by his instructor at the Banff School of Fine Arts a few decades earlier to lighten the burden of trying days.
Directed by Jayce Salloum
Cinematography, editing and sound: Jayce Salloum
With: Ahmed Jan, Mehdi Khan Agha, Hussain Ali
A grandson of Syrian or Lebanese immigrants, Jayce Salloum was born and raised on the territory of the Sylix (Okanagan) in Canada. A multidisciplinary artist since 1978, Salloum has produced work in installation, photography, video, performance and text, as well as curating and coordinating a vast array of cultural projects. He akins his practice to that of an itinerant geographer of conflicted territories (most everywhere), observing the world, creating and collecting images and texts to forge meaning from. In 2005, was commissioned by Kelowna’s Alternator Gallery to create a new video work for their compilation video project, “Temporal Transmissions,” part of the city’s 2005 centennial celebration. Salloum created untitled part 4: terra incognita, a video in which he interviewed local Syilx First Nations residents documenting the history and shameful legacy of Canada’s ongoing colonialism. The work is claimed by the local First Nations as their own and presented in schools as part of their history. In 2014, Salloum received the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.
Nothing Ever Happens Here, 2018
Sponge Gourd Collective, China/Canada/US 3:19 minutesFollowing the trail of the proposed high-speed rail route in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei megaregion, the collective of artists stopped to visit each town on the itinerary. They carried a portable green screen, which they styled as a speculative window into various landscapes. They invited passers-by and workers from the construction site on their lunch break to “enter” the speculative space it created and consider the forward-facing temporality by asking them to imagine their future onto the variety of places and scenes.
The Sponge Gourd Collective describes its mission as “a loofah for the future, a squad of green goons, a slimy surprise”. The collective’s practice is versed in the investigation of the urban transformation of Chinese futurities. With backgrounds in visual art, photography, anthropology, community organizing, film, and literature, they develop multimedia projects that broaden popular conceptions of China, to leave more room for the blurry spaces in between.
A Line Was Drawn, 2019
Mairéad McClean, UK 13:22 minutesWeaving together material from a variety of sources, blending animation with archival and documentary footage and layering contrasting sources of sound, Mairéad McClean’s short visual essay aims to interrogate critically the logic of ordering the world with borders and boundaries that control and prohibit movement and agency. The video’s structure contrasts provocatively with the canons of television reportage and documentary tasked with conveying a particular story.
Written, directed and edited by Mairéad McClean
Cinematography: Mairéad McClean
Music: Laura Cannell
Sound: Mairéad McClean
With: Tess Letham
With support from: The Wapping Project, London
Born and raised in Northern Ireland, Mairéad McClean is an award-winning filmmaker who has produced work around the themes of memory, identity and migration. Her practice crosses over film, video, sound and photography using material from a diverse range of sources. McClean has received awards across Europe. Her video work No More (2013), exploring questions around the introduction of internment without trial in Northern Ireland in 1971, won the inaugural MAC International Art Prize in 2014. Other notable exhibitions and screenings include Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020) and CCA Glasgow (2015).
Stealing Earth, 2018
Karan Shrestha, Nepal 12:27 minutesChitwan National Park, the first protected natural area in Nepal, was established in 1973, after having been a popular destination for hunting and trade for Nepal’s royalty and the British colonists for over a century. Since 1973, it has been touted as the emblem of biodiversity protection and for the development of tourism. There is nonetheless another reality to that park, that of its resident indigenous people who have been dependent on natural resources for their sustenance. For communities like Bote, Majhi, Musahar, Kumal and Chepang, the forest is their home. The governmental edicts for protection have resulted in forced evictions, loss of land and livelihood, arrests, torture and sexual assault by armed forces, faced by the marginalized indigenous communities.
Directed by Karan Shrestha
Cinematography: Karan Shrestha
Editing: Karen Williams
Sound: Udit Duseja
Karan Shrestha lives between Nepal and India. His multidisciplinary practice includes drawing, sculpture, photography, text, film and video and has thoroughly engaged with the complex, entangled relations of Nepal’s recent history. His works are synthesis of an archive of the terrain, political histories, transient memories and a speculative world that suspends reality, probing all the while at the fraught rhetoric of progress that is constantly pitted as the only way forward. He has screened and exhibited widely, most recently “Seismic Movements” at the Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh, 2020), Artpro International Video Art Festival Dhaka (Bangladesh, 2019), Yinchuan Biennale (2018) and Photo.Katmandu (Nepal 2018).
The Hole Journey, 2020
Ghita Skali, Morocco/The Netherlands 16:13 minutes16:13 minutesIn a Dutch art institution, the wooden planks of the floor in the director’s office become notably recessed exactly in the spot where his chair was for the duration of his 23 years in service. The size of the recession is 102 cm x 120 cm and Skali invited a carpenter to cut it out to use as a prop and ship to a destination in Morocco that is also expropriated land. The hole’s journey brings into light dynamics of power and agency with irony.
Written, directed and edited by Ghita Skali
Cinematography: Ghita Skali, Therese Di Campo, Piotr Urbaniec
Sound: Monzer El-Hachem
Cast: Frank Van Der Leeuw
Born in Casablanca, Ghita Skali studied at Villa Arson in France and participated in De Ateliers in Amsterdam. In her practice, she threads anecdotes, intriguing stories and rumors published in various media, while she borrows the codes of the street interview, the conference, the guided tour and medical congress to reveal the power relations they are embedded in. Her works have been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), été 78 (Brussels), Project Space Festival (Berlin), Cube Independent Art Space (Rabat) and at the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).
Syrialism, 2020
Dalia Al Kury, Palestine/Jordan/Norway 21 minutesSalam, a Syrian refugee in Norway, cannot stop thinking about the family members he left behind in war torn Syria. As his nightmares start to spill into reality, the ravaged streets of Der-el-Zor collude with the tranquil setting of Norwegian suburbs and in this liminal psychic space where Salam enacts what he yearns to do with his sisters and brother and finally his helplessness dissipates.
Written by Dalia Al Kury and Stev “Salam” Osten
Cinematography: Anders Hoft
Editing: Morten Haslerud
Music: Andreu Jacob
Sound: Andreu Jacob
Produced by Nefise Özkal Lorentzen and Jørgen Lorentzen
Dalia Al Kury is an independent filmmaker interested in hybrid cinematic genres. She has worked with a number of television channels, including ZDF Arte, Aljazeera and Al-Arabiya. Her first feature Possessed by Djinn premiered at HotDocs, and her most recent film Privacy of Wounds premiered at IDFA. She is currently an artistic research fellow at the Norwegian Film School.
Part II: Fatimah and Kulit, 2019
Pathompon Mont Tesprateep, Thailand 11 minutesBased on some of the stories in Assanee Pollajan’s (or Nai-Phee) Political Short Story collection, 1946-1969 (Nitankanmeung), set in the period of turmoil in the deep south of Thailand and wherein the author names his main protagonists Fatimah and Kulit, without specifying that they are the same person. In his adaptation, Mont rewrote the dialogue with the perspective of interrogating links between past and present, amnesia and history. Fatimah and Kulit is the second part of an ongoing film series (2019-present, 6 films in total) based on research about silenced events related the subnational conflict in the Deep South of Thailand, conducted through storytelling and reconstruction using a variety of sources including literature, traditional and contemporary music, ghost radio show and ritualistic performance.
Written and directed by Pathompon Mont Tesprateep
Cinematographer: Chukiat Wongsuwan
Editing and Sound: Pathompon Mont Tesprateep
Cast: Farida Jiraphan, Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit
Produced by Nuttaphan Yamkhaekhai
Born in Thailand, Pathompon Mont Tesprateep is an artist and filmmaker who earned his graduate degree in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts in London. Since 2014, Mont has been working on a series of hand-processed 16mm and Super8 films: Endless, Nameless (2014) and Song X (2017), Confusion Is Next (2018) and Fatimah and Kulit (2019-on-going). His works have been shown at various film festivals and exhibitions, including the Locarno International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Media/Art Kitchen at BACC (Bangkok), Asian Film & Video Art Forum, M+ Southeast Asia Moving Image Mixtape (Hong Kong), and in Crossroads at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2018).
We Have Always Known the Wind's Direction, 2020
Inas Halabi, Palestine 12 minutesInvestigating a suspected site for the burial of nuclear waste in the West Bank, Halabi splices different elements, fragments of conversations, an interview with a nuclear physicist, location footage and landscapes, to interrogate codes of representation and communication, while withholding or delaying the delivery of information. The isotope Cesium 137, invisible but deadly, could be seen as a synecdoche for a more ungraspable invisibility – the systemic networks of power and control in the region – and this work as a meditation on how to account for the unfilmable but inexorable.
Written, directed and edited by: Inas Halabi
Cinematography: Inas Halabi
Sound: Sarouna Mushasha
Inas Halabi is a Palestinian artist working predominantly with film. She holds an MFA from Goldsmiths College in London and recently completed a residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. In 2016, she was awarded first prize for the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year. Recent exhibitions and screenings include the Mosaic Rooms, London (2019); TENT, Rotterdam (2019); De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2019); Silent Green Betonhalle, Berlin (2019); Smith College Museum of Art, USA (2018); and the 13th Sharjah Biennial’s Offsite project, Shifting Ground (2017).
Shadow & Act, 2019
Taiki Sakpisit, Thailand 23 minutesOnce the most prominent photography studio in Thailand, Chaya Jitrakorn was built in 1940 and shut down in 2012. Known for its high-profile clientele, it was built like a castle with many secret pathways and rooms. Taiki Sakpisit filmed the studio’s ruin and found in the archive room portraits of the dictator Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram and leading political figures, uniformed male and female officers standing in front of now demolished buildings, historical trial sessions, official events, field inspection, national ceremonies, and many mysteries. Shadow and Act captures the relic of the studio like the corpse of a deceased Giant, to experiment with the relationships between memory, space, past and future.
Written, directed, filmed and edited by Taiki Sakpisit.
Music: Yasuhiro Morinaga
Taiki Sakpisit is a filmmaker and moving image artist working in Thailand. His experimental short films have been presented at several exhibitions and film festivals. His first feature length film The Edge of Daybreak premiered at the 50th International Film Festival in Rotterdam and won the FIPRESCI award.
Drifting with the Summer Tides
The program will be available for free and worldwide on cfmdc.tv for 2 weeks between 23 July and 6 August 2021.
SAVAC is thrilled to announce the final program of films and screening details for MONITOR 14: Drifting with the Summer Tides curated by Rasha Salti. This edition of MONITOR asks the viewer to float and travel towards different realities and lived experiences that the artists and filmmakers find necessary to mediate and communicate. The program articulates along four movements, Billowing Tide, Wave Crest, Breaker Tide, and Ebbing Wave, featuring films by: Meera Devidayal, Gian Spina, Valerio Rocco Orlando, Jayce Salloum, Sponge Gourd, Mairead McClean, Karan Shrestha, Ghita Skali, Dalia Al-Kury, Pathompon Mont Tesprateep, Inas Halabi and Taiki Sakpisit.
For a deeper look into the program, we invite you to read Rasha Salti’s curatorial musings on the making of Drifting with the Summer Tides.
“Let’s swim to the moon
Let’s climb through the tide
Surrender to the waiting worlds
That lap against our side.”
― Jim Morrison
“A single poem, alone
can turn tides
scatter galaxies
and burst forth with rivers
from paradise.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos
In the fall of 2019, the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre at the outskirts of Paris invited Jean-Luc Godard to deploy moving image, video and film installations in the entire space of the theatre for a span of 3 weeks. During the event, Palestinian writer Elias Sanbar, a long-time accomplice of Godard’s, was invited to give a talk. An 18-year-old student who was in the audience of Sanbar’s talk raised his hand and asked: “How can I make sense of Godard’s films? I am captivated but I feel I am missing the meaning, and I am not familiar with the references that are present throughout.” Sanbar reassured him: “Don’t worry about the references, you don’t need to be a savant or cinephile to unlock their meaning, just let yourself drift with each film, don’t fixate on deciphering dialogue or plot. Imagine yourself floating as if you were in water and let the images carry you where they want to.” I was reminded of this allegory, to float with the drift of films when I was watching the submissions to this present edition of Monitor . When I first received the list of links, I (blissfully) did not know what to expect and thought best during this first viewing to let the drift of each film carry me, and shoo away any temptation to research each filmmaker or artist, and classify, frame and index the short films and videos. In my notebook, I noted motifs, or keywords to guide the next steps: water, memory, land, desert, ghosts, etc.
Cinema, and even less so video art, doesn’t intend to communicate information or facts. Its aspiration is entirely different, and although the synopses in the program contain verbs like ‘investigate’, ‘explore’ and ‘probe’, what they capture, represent, deconstruct or reveal, is a much more profound layer of the ‘Real’, or our being in the world today. What they mediate is at once subjective, poetic, complex, and subversive. They weave connections between seemingly unrelated events or facts, they foreground obfuscated chapters from the past that crucially shift perceptions of the present, they bring into visibility what has been overshadowed or erased and give voice to what has been silenced. In other words, watching the films and videos, especially in the time of this pandemic, was a marvelous (and merciful) invitation to travel to different places in the world and drift towards realities and lived experiences that the artists and filmmakers conceived as urgent, necessary and important to create and mediate.
Taking cue from the allegorical experience of the drift, the intention behind the curatorial conceit wants to accentuate the various kinds of resonances among short films and videos; resonances that amplify poetic and existential kinships, or build on one another to generate something new, or highlight consonances across the world. Resonances like tides. Tides are a measure of the rise and drop in levels of water of seas, they are the outcome of the attraction of the Moon and Sun and they generate energy. As the Moon revolves around the Earth, its angle (also known as declination) increases and decreases in relation to the equator, and similarly as the Earth rotates around the Sun the latter’s relative position to the equator changes. The Sun’s declination affects the seasons as well as the tides. The closer the Moon is to the Earth the greater the tides will be. The same goes for the closeness of the Earth to the Sun, although since the Moon is in a closer proximity to the Earth, it has the greatest influence over the cycle of tides. For instance, when the Earth, Moon, and Sun line up (which happens at times of full moon or new moon) the lunar and solar tides reinforce each other, leading to more extreme tides, known as spring tides.
I have described the challenge of curating this 14th edition of Monitor, selecting the films and organizing them into a program, to be like building a puzzle with the individual pieces available but not the final picture. With the allegories of drift, resonances, tides and waves, the framework is neither rigidly prescriptive nor too loose. The proposed program articulates along four movements or allegories, the billowing tide, the wave crest, the breaker tide and the ebbing wave. The “billowing tide” is the high tide, when the water levels are at their highest as are the gravitational pulls of celestial bodies. The three films in that program, Meera Devidayal’s Water Has Memory, Gian Spina’s Jordão and Valerio Rocco Orlando’s Dialogue with the Unseen seem animated by a billowing existential drive to plumb our relationships to place (whether urban or natural), beyond the modern ideological constructs that human beings have vested into it. From metaphysical meditations on the meanings of belonging and placemaking, to exploring the off-frame and mechanics of political subjectivities and placemaking, the second program is titled the “wave crest”. The most visible and emblematic part of the wave, the crest is where the wave tips as it rises and where the water appears to froth. If the amplitude of crests and frequency of waves are in phase, they are said to be in ‘constructive interference’, and that is what the compilation of films in this second program seem to produce, building a momentum of resonance that ripples across the world, beginning with Jayce Salloum’s untitled part 9: this time, followed by the Sponge Collective’s Nothing Ever Happens Here, Mairéad McClean’s A Line Was Drawn and finally Karan Shrestha’s Stealing Earth. Titled “breaker tide”, the third program refers to the extreme amplitude that waves can sometimes reach, the kinetic energy they produce is described as turbulent. The caustic, subversive and absurd dramaturgies of Ghita Skali’s The Hole Journey, and Dalia Al Kury’s Syrialism seem to do just what a breaker does, tumble the ‘Real’ and the lived experience of traumatic political situations all the while instigating turbulence with irony. And last, the fourth program, titled “ebbing wave”, refers to the movement of the tide as it drains away from the shore, the traces it leaves momentarily exposed before it flows back again. The films in the program engage with precarious markings, traces of actions, remains of interventions that have been overrun by changing political circumstances and contexts, in other words, archives and memory subjected to the ebbs and flows of systems. In Pathompon Mont Tesprateep’s Part II: Fatimah and Kulit, the tormented past of political oppression is resurrected in the present through storytelling and language, in Inas Halabi’s We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction the inquest into undisclosed nuclear waste disposal is scrambled and in Taiki Sakpisit’s Shadow & Act the abandoned ruin of a photography studio frequented by the military junta of Thailand revives an unexamined history.
Drifting with the Summer Tides draws from allegories of tidal and wave movements to invite you to discover how filmmakers and artists imagine, narrate, represent and re-articulate our being in the world within a living environment with relationships to placemaking, subjectivity, agency, our being as carriers of memory and of a counter-memory of resistance, our being as carriers of ideology and of struggle.
Billowing Tide
Water Has Memory, Meera Devidayal, 2018, India, 8 minutes
Jordão, Gian Spina, 2020, Brazil/Palestine/Jordan, 25 minutes
Dialogue with the Unseen, Valerio Rocco Orlando, 2o19, Italy/Palestine, 24 minutes
Wave Crest
Untitled Part 9: this time, Jayce Salloum, 2020, Canada/Afghanistan, 6 minutes
Nothing Ever Happens Here, Sponge Gourd Collective [Daphne Xu, Beatrix Chu, Diane Zhou], 2018, China/Canada/US, 3 minutes
A Line Was Drawn, Mairead McClean, 2019, UK, 13 minutes
Stealing Earth, Karan Shrestha, 2018, Nepal, 12 minutes
Breaker Tide
The Hole’s Journey, Ghita Skali, 2020, Morocco/The Netherlands, 16 minutes
Syrialism, Dalia Al-Kury, 2020, Palestine/Jordan/Norway, 20 minutes
Ebbing Wave
Part II: Fatimah and Kulit, Pathompon Mont Tesprateep, 2019, Thailand, 11 minutes
We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction, Inas Halabi, 2020, Palestine, 12 minutes
Shadow & Act, Taiki Sakpisit, 2019, Thailand, 23 minutes
MONITOR 14 is co-sponsored by:
MONITOR is dedicated to the presentation of experimental short films and videos that initiate dialogue around the shifting nature of politics, economies and landscapes across the Global South and its diasporas
