— Inas Halabi
Works in exhibition
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
Image by Özgür Atlagan
Image by Cesare De Giglio
Image by Özgür Atlagan
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