untitled part 1: everything and nothing (1999) souha bechara after her release from captivity in israeli prison el-khiam in south lebanon.
An intimate dialogue that weaves back and forth between representations of a figure (of resistance) and subject with, Soha Bechara ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter in her Paris dorm room taped (during the last year of the Israeli occupation) one year after her release from captivity in El-Khiam torture and interrogation centre (S. Lebanon) where she had been detained for 10 years, 6 years in isolation. Revising notions of resistance, survival and will, recounting to death, separation and closeness; the overexposed image and body of a surviving martyr speaking quietly and directly into the camera juxtaposed against her self and image, not speaking of the torture but of the distance between the subject and loss, of what is left behind and what remains.
On Vimeo (40:46) https://vimeo.com/71401594
Fun fact about this video: it was included in Canada's first ever exhibition of contemporary art by Arab-Canadian artists. The exhibition, however, was set to open just days before 9/11 happened, and so it was postponed -- to a great deal of public controversy -- because the simple fact of the artists being of Arab descent was somehow seen to make the whole thing too much of a hot button issue. This video in particular by Jayce Salloum was seen as being especially controversial.
Thankfully, the Canadian government officially spoke out against the museum's postponement as being a racist conflation of all Arabs with terrorists, and so the show went back on. But it never got the widespread acclaim it deserved as a historic moment in Canadian art, since a lot of the other museums it was supposed to travel to dropped it, and its pioneering curator, Aida Kaouk, was pushed out of her position at the museum :( The artists' open letter about the exhition's censorship here: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/43636/the-postponement-of-exhibition-on-arab-canadian-art





























