L'Arrière pays, Arab territories in an archipelago

The works selected here for the exhibition L'Arrière-pays et ses écrans parallèles use the parameters of historical or fictional situations such as fear, suspicion, control, authority and submission, to question the meaning of secrecy, the archive and the codes of language that construct the mirror of reality. They take the critical form of counter-narratives and life courses, the "asymptote of reality", in the words of film theorist André Bazin.

Conceived as a journey through cycles of disparate narratives, dealing with transmission (Marwa Arsanios, Ammar Khodja, Sirine Fatouh, Bouchra Khalili, Elika Hedayat, Dania Reymond), political geographies (Randa Maddah), buried history (Ghassan Halwani, Taysir Batniji, Safia Benhaïm), memory (Medhi Meddaci) and political fictions (Randa Maroufi, Larissa Sanssour). All these works are set today in geopolitical spaces at war or chronically unstable. Recharging themselves in spite of themselves with a problematic present, the works validate the great power of art to formulate hypotheses that give rise to thought, reaffirming the necessity, as the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard wrote, of "a thought that forms and a form that thinks".

With :

Lamine Ammar Khodja ( Algerie), Demande à ton ombre, 2012, 82'

Marwa Arsanios ( Lebanon), Have You Ever Killed a Bear? Or Becoming Jamila, 2013-2014, 25'.Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part I and II, 2019, 57',

Taysir Batniji ( Palestine), Miradors, 2008 (set of 12 blue-backed photos) . GH0809, Maison 1,11, 16, 19,25,27,29,31, 2010, (set of 8 blue-backed photos)

Safia Benhaïm ( Morocco) , La Fièvre, 2015,39'

Sirine Fattouh (Lebanon), A Night in Beyrouth, 2006, 8'. Another Night in Beyrouth, 2019, 20'25''

Ghassan Halwani ( Lebanon), Erased_Ascent of The Invisible, 2018,76'

Elika Hedayat ( Iran), Child's Play, 2008, 14'35''

Bouchra Khalili ( Morocco) , The Typographer, 2019, 3'30''

Randa Maddah ( Syria) , Light Horizon, 2012, 7'22''. In View, ( Occupied Golan Heights) 2017, 7'.

Randa Maroufi,( Morocco) , Bab Sebta, 2019, 19', Loan Frac Paca

Medhi Meddaci ( Algerie), les Blocs, (Série Les Yeux tournent autour du soleil), 2013, 19'20

Dania Reymond ( Algerie), La Tempête, 2016,10'

Larissa Sansour (Palestine) , A Space Exodus, 2009, 5'

Free admission.

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