Unmade Film at Chronic
Egypt
April 20, 2016 till June 4, 2016
Unmade Film at Chronic
At 7:00 pm
Location
Contemporary Image Collective
22 Abdel Khalek Tharwat – Downtown, Cairo
Contact
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Swiss artist and former artist in residence Uriel Orlow will take part in the exhibition Chronic with his work “Unmade Film” organized by Contemporary Image Collective from April 20 until June 4.
Chronic is the second chapter of If Not For That Wall, a long term project on different forms of imprisonment. Articulated in fragments, the exhibition, film program, talks and book readings that form part of the six week program question the power of differentiation between the “sane” and the “pathological”. The title Chronic refers to a continuous state that lasts beyond an exceptional moment in time and is complex and severe in nature. Chronic considers emotional states ranging from a diffuse sense of fatigue or sadness to the trauma of people with experience of imprisonment and the history of the struggle to open mental institutions.
Chronic tries to adopt psychological exhaustion as an entry point to read the current political and social reality and to engage with the trauma and haunting caused by conflict and forced exclusion. The chapter tries to visit blind spots in the history of places and events through the experiences of people exposed to violence, occupation and imprisonment. These accumulated layers of suffering, often absent from the larger historical narratives, echo in the psychological state of those most closely exposed to it. With Chronic we would like to propose a turn to psychology and emotions as a possibility to acknowledge what lies within and is alienated from our vision and language. The exhibition will also include works by The Abbasiya Outsiders, Alberto Grifi, Dora Garcia, Mohammad Shawky Hassan
“Unmade Film” is a fragmented film about the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, which witnessed a terrible massacre in 1948 leading to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from many cities and villages. The village also houses a hospital that was established in 1951 to treat Holocaust survivors and became a psychiatric clinic where no acknowledgement of the occupation of the houses of Palestinians and no commemoration of the Nakba is allowed. The resulting work combines sound, drawing, video, music and photography.
