• Sat 28 09 2024 / 6 pm •
Undoing Images III
Mentors: MADHUSREE DUTTA, MOHAMED GAWAD, ALA YOUNIS
The pilot project NEW CURATORS, which takes place in collaboration with Filmhaus Köln, presents its public film program Undoing Images at Filmhaus, curated by the mentors of the program.
Ala Younis - the current Artistic Director of the Academy of the Arts of the World, artist, and architect who works in research, curation and collaboration, Madhusree Dutta – filmmaker, author and former Artistic Director of the ADKDQ, and Mohamed A. Gawad – editor and filmmaker – will present a curated selection of films, dealing on the deconstruction and reconstruction of images.
The program focuses on the question of locations, the search for materials and its reappropriation as well as the effects of colonial imagery, providing an in-depth and multi-layered lens on stories, which are often forgotten in common narratives.
With this selection of films, the mentors want to express resistance against the supposed infallibility of cinema - especially against the narratives shaped by the magic of moving images. Undoing Images invites the audience to question and reinterpret the power and possibilities of images.
Program:
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM + 20 minutes insights of selected films/curations by Madhusree Dutta (120 min)
Occidente (2015), Ana Vaz
Filmed in Lisbon in search for the originals of our colonial history I found copies. Brazilians, the new worlders fluent in glitz, entertain the Portuguese in awe and discomfort, colonial norms applied and reapplied. Chinese porcelain seems to signal the hybrids to come: the Chinese dressed as Europeans, the Brazilian maid dressed as an European 19th century servant. 15th century porcelain becomes reproducible readymades that set the tables for the new colonies - a trans-Atlantic calling. Ouro novo reads new money. As a poem without full stops, as a breath without breathing, the voyage travels eastwards and westwards marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s sitting around a table.
Erased, Ascent of the Invisible (2018), Ghassan Halwani
2014 on a wall in the city of Beirut are spread layers over layers of hundreds of torn posters.
Selling lines and ripped images jump to the eye: apartments, pastries, concerts, loans, restaurants, plumbing, religious tours for the faithful.. anything!
Suddenly, in the middle of this rubble, a glimpse: the partial picture of a face. Only a moustache, the trace of a shy smile, a chin, and part of an ear. Also noticeable in the photo, the fragments of a black leather jacket.
A vagabond with a pencil sets to heal the rest of the face, restoring its missing traits.
"The image of a man whose features were convincing took shape in front of me! But who is that man?"
On his unsettled journey through Beirut, various encounters and incidents constantly put the vagabond back on track, on the trail of the people gone missing during the Lebanese civil war.
But the vagabond faces a city striving by all possible means to erase those traces beyond recovery, to a point of no return.
Sat 28 09 | 6 - 8 pm
Location: Filmhaus Köln
Address: Maybachstraße 111, 50670 Cologne
In English language
Tickets are available via Filmhaus Köln
The room is step-free accessible
