To A Returning Cloud — Brookline Arts Center

Current & Upcoming Exhibitions To A Returning Cloud

To A Returning Cloud
— Inas Halabi

On view July 27 — November 2, 2024 at Brookline Arts Center

To a Returning Cloud explores the relationship between landscape, systems of power and colonialism’s ongoing effect on the natural and urban environments. Combining film and sound, the works on display examine territories and events haunted by the impacts of colonialism and racism, and their imprint on land, human and other-than-human forms of life.

Register for the Public Reception & Conversation with Inas Halabi on October 27 at 6pm

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Works in Exhibition

We No Longer Prefer Mountains (2023)Film / 93 min / Colour / DCP, HD / Arabic, English We No Longer Prefer Mountains begins with an ascent of Mount Carmel upon which the Druze towns of Dalyet el Carmel and Isfiya are located, drawing the viewer into a world of geographic isolation and a locale shaped by coercion and control. Weaving together intimate engagements with members of the community in shared domestic spaces and outdoor environments, the film explores how the inner politics of the Druze have been reconfigured and reshaped since 1948, whilst opening up possibilities for imagining alternative futures.

Screening: October 29, 2024 / 6:30p / More Information & Tickets

Hopscotch (the Centre of the Sun's Radiance)Video installation / 2.5 hours loopedHopscotch takes listeners on a journey across two continents – Africa and Europe – to explore the ways in which histories of labor tied to the train’s development are embedded in the landscape. Through field recordings, oral histories and radio broadcasts captured near the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo and a former UMHK-owned uranium refinery in Olen, Belgium, the project examines how the (colonial) past continues in the present, albeit under different guises. Borrowing the title of Julio Cortázar’s eponymous novel, Hopscotch shifts between chapters whose beginnings and ends are never the same, disrupting the notion of linear time that structures both historical and train-based narratives.

We Have Always Known the Wind's DirectionVideo installation / 11:57 minWe Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction has an outward subject and an inward one. Via a gear-shifting combination of conversation, interview and expressive location footage, it probes the possible burial of nuclear waste in the South of the West Bank. But as the footage cycles between fragmented conversations with a nuclear physicist and landscapes that are uneasily underscored by what we hear (and sometimes tinted an ill-omened red), another context emerges. In various ways, the delivery of information is thwarted, withheld, or delayed, and the film comes to turn on issues of representation and conveyance. The isotope Cesium 137, invisible but deadly, functions as a synecdoche for more intangible forms of violence – the systemic networks of power and control in the region – and this work as a meditation on how to account for the un-filmable but inexorable.

Previous Installations

Hopscotch at de Appel Amsterdam
Image by Özgür Atlagan

We No Longer Prefer Mountains at The Showroom London
Image by Cesare De Giglio

We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction at de Appel Amsterdam
Image by Özgür Atlagan

Inas Halabi (b. 1988, Palestine) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her practice is concerned with how social and political forms of power are manifested and the impact that overlooked or suppressed histories have on contemporary life. She holds an MFA from Goldsmiths College in London and completed the De Ateliers artist residency in 2019. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Hot Docs Film Festival, Toronto (2023), de Appel, Amsterdam (2023), Showroom London (2022), Europalia Festival, Brussels (2021), Silent Green Betonhalle, Berlin (2021); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2020); and Film at Lincoln Center, USA (2020). She lives and works between Palestine and the Netherlands.

www.halabinas.com

To a Returning Cloud and the U.S. premiere screening of We No Longer Prefer Mountains are supported by:

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