Disrupted Pasts, Displaced Futures
Unpacking the ArteArchive is an ongoing legacy project, preserving and presenting the organization’s ArteArchive of film and video by artists from the Middle East, North Africa and their diasporas. ArteEast’s vision is of a thriving and sustainable arts sector in the Middle East and North Africa. Its mission is to deepen international arts engagement and to provide support to MENA-based artists and arts organizations in order to broaden the global audience for contemporary culture from the region.
Join ArteEast and the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (VAC) for the upcoming film screening Disrupted Pasts, Displaced Futures. The film program is a selection of moving image works by contemporary artists from the Middle East and North Africa, blending science fiction, arabfuturism, and magic realism to tackle themes of displacement, migration, and climate crisis. Responding to an unstable present through the lens of the future, these alternate realities open a space where new possibilities emerge.
The film Before I Forget directed by our fellow Mariam Mekiwi is a science-fiction story set in an indistinct coastal region, between land and sea, above and below water. El Captain disappears, one of his disciples takes a journey in the ocean to cut off the internet cable, the water level is rising, an amphibian woman appears at the shore looking for her mother, and the memories of two women in a ward intertwine. Scientist Dr. Sharaf is trying to congregate all of them – the members of the secret society of amphibians – in an attempt to save the world. Before I Forget premiered at the 2018 Berlinale as part of Forum Expanded.
Program will be accompanied by a pre-recorded panel discussion with artists Mariam Mekiwi and Larissa Sansour, moderated by ArteEast Film Curator Ginou Choueiri.
Access the film here.
When? Where?
24 - 27 July 2021
Online stream on Eventive