VENICE: For its second showing during the Venice Biennale, Qatar is staging the exhibition “Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices” that takes a profound, in-depth look at the last decade of film and video art by Arab, South Asian and African filmmakers.
While Qatar has yet to have its own national pavilion, its exhibition occupies the 459-year-old Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti on the Grand Canal. The works on show are drawn from the collections of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Contemporary Art, the Doha Film Institute and the forthcoming Art Mill Museum (scheduled to open in 2030). It is divided into ten galleries, each comprising films and video art according to a specific theme such as ruins, women’s voices, borders, exile and deserts and is curated by Paris-based Matthieu Orlean, a film and video expert. The exhibition will run until November 2024.
“Film is very relevant to our institutions and is an important part of our collections,” Zeina Arida, Director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Arab Art in Doha, told Arab News.
“It is a great way to document our contemporary times,” she added. “Film is also a great way of to share who we are and what we are going through, what we as societies from these less represented countries are living and the issues we are facing.”
In-depth storytelling can be found in the films on view by Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari, Larissa Sansour, Fares Fayyad, Ali Cherri, Shaima Al-Tamimi, Ramata-Toulaye Sy, Hassan Khan and Sophia Al-Maria, among others.
In a documentary and largely journalistic style, many of the works shed light on current events and issues not often covered in mainstream media, including the now one-year old conflict in Sudan or migrants seeking new homes such as those captured in the film by Yemeni East African filmmaker Shaima Al-Tamini who charted the journey of her family from Kenya and Zanibar to the UAE.
“I was looking at movies that were different from the rest — that take a risk of telling their own story in a specific way,” curator Orlean told Arab News. “The filmmakers of these films are foreigners in their own environment because they are capturing events, whether personal or collective, that many people don’t see even in the news. Many deal with the themes of migration, social differences and exile.”
The works on view showcase both long and short films. A few highlights include Ali Cherri’s “The Dam” (2022), charting the story of a Darfuri seasonal worker from Sudan who works during the night to create a mud-brick monument. The film is a political fable that tells of the power of imagination against the backdrop of the Sudanese revolution. There is also Qatari artist Sophia Al-Maria’s well-known work “Black Friday” (2016) and British-born Egyptian multimedia artist Hassan Khan’s “Jewel” (2010) featuring a luminescent fish in dark waters followed by two men dancing to Arabic music.
“‘Jewel’ was triggered by a moment witnessed on the street in Cairo in 2006 — two men dancing around a speaker with raw, brutal and beautiful music blaring out,” Khan told Arab News. “It took four years before I could finally produce the work for Mathaf's opening exhibition in 2010 and by then so much was bubbling around us that it seemed to channel something real. Imagine a one second flickering daydream slowed down and stretched into six intense minutes. It is about our deepest sources — history, culture, emotion — and how we communicate the alien that lives inside all of us.”
Fatma Hassan Alremaihi, Director of Doha Film Institute, spoke to Arab News about the importance of sharing regional viewpoints.
"We are celebrating 15 years since the inauguration of the Doha Film Institute and the journey we've been on with film in the Arab world throughout this period," Alremaihi told Arab News. "One of our biggest missions is to support films from the region and help filmmakers tell their stories - their stories in their own way, not like everyone else would like to interpret their stories or present their stories, which have largely been distorted for hundreds of years."
"There's now a great crossover between art and film," added Alremaihi. "It is the first time we are presenting films in this manner where we take excerpts from films and categorize them into themes and stage them within rooms and exhibitions. I am really pleased we had this opportunity because it celebrates the work that we've done over the last 15 years - work that has led us to call today a new golden age for Arab cinema."
