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Beirut 12/3/2018 Sci-Fi Trilogy Larissa Sansour 11 April

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Beirut 12/3/2018 Sci-Fi Trilogy Larissa Sansour 11 April Press Release – Beirut 12/3/2018 Sci-Fi Trilogy Larissa Sansour 11 April – 6 June 2018 Opening on April 11 at 6:00 PM – Media tour at 5:30 PM Dar El-Nimer for Arts and Culture presents Sci-Fi Trilogy, an exhibition by Larissa Sansour. The exhibition brings together three of Sansour’s films – A Space Exodus (2009), Nation Estate (2012) and In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2016). Under the common themes of loss, belonging, heritage and national identity, the films explore aspects of the social and political turmoil of the Middle East. While A Space Exodus envisions the final uprootedness of the Palestinian experience and takes the current political predicament to its extra-terrestrial extreme by landing the first Palestinian on the moon, Nation Estate reveals a sinister account of an entire population restricted to a single skyscraper. In the trilogy’s final instalment, In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, a narrative resistance leader engages in archaeological warfare in a desperate attempt to secure the future of her people. Using the language of sci-fi and glossy production, Sansour’s trilogy presents a dystopian vision of a Middle East on the brink of the apocalypse. The three films are shown alongside related installations, sculptural and photographic works. In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2016) Sansour’s most recent film, In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain, is a 29-minute science fiction short set in the cross-section between sci-fi, archaeology and politics. The film explores the role of myth for history, fact and national identity. A narrative resistance group makes underground deposits of elaborate porcelain. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands. By implementing a myth of its own, their work becomes a historical intervention – de facto creating a nation. Archaeology in Absentia is a sculptural installation and performance project bringing the film’s fiction back into reality. A series of 15 bronze munition replicas all contain discs holding the coordinates to deposits of hand-painted porcelain buried throughout Palestine. The coordinates of each porcelain deposit were established during real-life entombment performances in places like Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Gaza, Ramallah, the Dead Sea, Nazareth, Jericho, Haifa and Jaffa. With the porcelain itself absent from the installation, the bombshells and the references they hold represent the archaeological artefacts in absentia. Revisionist Production Line is part of Sansour’s recent body of works exploring the notion of archaeology as warfare. In Palestine, archaeology has long since become a battleground for settling territorial disputes. Unearthed artefacts are used in support of nationalist narratives establishing the idea of historical entitlement. Instead of relying on artefacts already in the ground, Sansour suggests that manufacturing and planting the archaeological evidence for future archaeologists to excavate might be the most reliable approach to establishing a favourable counter- narrative. Sansour’s most recent work And They Covered the Sky Until It Was Black, is a suspended installation made up of 1500 miniature spaceships, assuming the shape of insects, so that they as a group appear as a dark locust swarm. With the reference to the plagues of The Old Testament, the installation becomes a futuristic doomsday vision with biblical undertones. The title of the piece is a paraphrase of a quote from Exodus. Nation Estate (2012) Nation Estate is a 9-minute sci-fi short film offering a clinically dystopian, yet humorous approach to the deadlock in the Middle East. With a mixture of computer-generated imagery, live actors and arabesque electronica, Nation Estate explores a vertical solution to Palestinian statehood. In Sansour’s film, Palestinians have their state in the form of a single skyscraper: the Nation Estate. One colossal high-rise houses the entire Palestinian population – now finally living the high life. Each city has its own floor: Jerusalem on the 13th floor, Ramallah on the 14th floor, Sansour’s native Bethlehem on the 21st and so on. Aiming for a sense of belonging, the lobby of each floor re-enacts iconic squares and landmarks. The story follows the female lead, played by Sansour herself, in a futuristic folklore suit returning home from a trip abroad and making her way through the lobby of the monstrous building – sponsored and sanctioned by the international community. Having passed the security checks, she takes the elevator to the Bethlehem floor and crosses Manger Square and Church of the Nativity on her way to her apartment where she prepares a plate of sci-fi tabouleh. The film is accompanied by a photo series. A Space Exodus (2009) A Space Exodus quirkily sets up an adapted stretch of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in a Middle Eastern political context. The recognizable music scores of the 1968 science fiction film are changed to arabesque chords matching the surreal visuals of Sansour’s film. The film follows the director herself onto a phantasmagoric journey through the universe echoing Stanley Kubrick’s thematic concerns for human evolution, progress and technology. However, in her film, Sansour posits the idea of a first Palestinian into space, and, referencing Armstrong’s moon landing, she interprets this theoretical gesture as ‘a small step for a Palestinian, a giant leap for mankind’. This five-minute short is packed with highly produced visual imagery. The arabesque elements ranging from the space suit to the music are merged within a dreamy galactic setting and elaborate special effects. A great deal of attention is paid to every detail of the film to create a never before seen case of thrillingly magical Palestinian displacement. A Space Exodus is shown alongside Sansour’s 30cm vinyl sculptures known as the Palestinauts. About Larissa Sansour Born in East Jerusalem, Sansour studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. Her work is interdisciplinary and uses film, photography, installation and sculpture. She lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions include the Bluecoat in Liverpool, New Art Exchange in Nottingham, Nikolaj Kunst in Copenhagen, Turku Art Museum in Finland, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Kulturhuset in Stockholm and DEPO in Istanbul. Sansour's work has featured in the biennials of Istanbul, Busan and Liverpool. She has exhibited at venues such as Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; LOOP, Seoul; Barbican, London; Al Hoash, Jerusalem; Queen Sofia Museum, Madrid; Centre for Photography, Sydney; Cornerhouse, Manchester; Townhouse, Cairo; Maraya Arts Centre, Sharjah, UAE; Empty Quarter, Dubai; Galerie Nationale de Jeu de Paume, Paris; Iniva, London; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Third Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou , China; Louisiana Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark; House of World Cultures, Berlin, and MOCA, Hiroshima. Sansour is represented by Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai, Sabrina Amrani in Madrid and Montoro12 Contemporary Art in Rome. She lives and works in London. Artist Statement 'Central to my practice is the tug and pull between fiction and reality in a Middle Eastern context. In several pieces over the past years, I have been exploring not only the sci-fi genre but also the comic book superhero. Both forms have an inherent ability to communicate the most fundamental ambitions of a people or a civilisation in a way that is naturally inspired by - but never hampered or restricted by a non-fictional reality. Also, despite its high production value and glossy imagery, sci-fi tends to allow for a specific kind of almost nostalgia framing of the topic at hand. Even the slickest sci-fi almost invariably carries within it a sense of retro, ideas of the future tend to appear standard and cliché at the same time as they come across as visionary. In the case of Palestine, there is an eternal sense of forecasting statehood, independence and the end of occupation. The ambitious ideas that we hope to achieve have long since become so repetitive that the odd mix of nostalgia and accomplishment that the sci-fi genre often embodies lends it itself well to the topic.' – Larissa Sansour. For more information please contact Omar Thawabeh | Communication Officer | [email protected] | +961 81 71 43 49 .
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