إيلاف

[sirilaf]

Eclipses (2014), Ismaïl Bahri A paper shutter is grafted on to the camera lens. It just lets you see what is occurring at the edges; it almost totally obstructs the field of vision. The paper functions as a shutter but also as a screen. It lets you see what the wind decides to show you. It hides as much as it shows: it leads the eye to the margins and shows the premises of the off-camera scope.

[sirilaf]

Dénouement (2011), Ismaïl Bahri This video deals with a sort of acuity of the eyes, as an echo to the seamstresses’ activity focused on the tenuous event that is the formation of a knot or the movement of a line in space. The tight thread is a line in alarm, a vibratory vector conveying the hands’ poundings. Like the alarm thread linking the spider to its web, the tight link probes the empty space that separates the black silhouette from the viewer. It shows the movement of the hands on the camera. Slowly, the body enters the image field. As it moves forward, the video comes to an end: the space plan becomes deep, the white area becomes a landscape and the line becomes volume. The formation of the knot looks like an envelopment operation, a wound up condensation of the crossed space, as if holding the reel in our hand was like taking this space with us.

[sirilaf]

In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, Larissa Sansour, 2015

[modernbaghdad]

Watermelon sellers on the Tigris, Baghdad, c1932

بائعوا البطيخ في قوارب على نهر دجلة، بغداد، ١٩٣٢

https://www.facebook.com/modernbaghdad/

[sirilaf]

Mohammed Kazem, Tongue, 1994. Detail. Performed in Dubai, 1994. Documentary photographs, 45 gelatin silver prints mounted on 5 corrugated boards (1 lost), 43 x 43 cm each.

[sirilaf]

Hassan Sharif, Jumping No. 1, 1983 Seven chromogenic prints mounted on cardboard, 83 x 58.5 cm..

[sirilaf]

I am afraid that it is too late for the leftists in the West to express any solidarity with the Syrians in their extremely hard struggle. What I always found astonishing in this regard is that mainstream Western leftists know almost nothing about Syria, its people, its political economy, its contemporary history. Rarely have I found a useful piece of information or a genuinely creative idea in their analyses. My impression about this curious situation is that they simply don not see us; it is not about us at all. Syria is only an additional occasion for their old anti-imperialist tirades, never the living subject of the debate… We, rank-and-file Syrians, refugees, women, students, intellectuals, human rights activists, political prisoners… do not exist… But honestly I’ve failed to discern who is right and who is left in the West from a leftist Syrian point of view… Before helping Syrians or showing solidarity with Syrians, the mainstream Western left needs to help themselves.

Yassin al-Haj Saleh

[archivings]

Yohji Yamamoto Pour Homme Spring/Summer 2001, backstage photos by Martina Hoogland-Ivanow for MR High Fashion December 2000

[sirilaf]

“Yes, artists like Forough Farrokhzad were brilliant, and yes, their legacies continue to shine, but make no mistake: they were brilliant precisely (and solely) because they were Forough Farrokhzad, Sadegh Hedayat, Bahman Mohassess, or whomever else – not the Iranian Sylvia Plath, Kafka, or Picasso. Their works spoke (and speak) for themselves, and comparisons to perceived Western counterparts, however gratifying some may find them, are not only beside the fact, but also disrespectful and disempowering.” Reorient Mag

[sirilaf]

Students at Sciences Po Rennes, a public university in northwestern France, staged a mass walk-out from a lecture by the Israeli ambassador on Thursday.

The students chanting “Liberté pour la Palestine” – freedom for Palestine – as the ambassador, Aliza Bin Noun, sits at the podium.

[gemini]

My phone: *incoming call* Me: 🔫👀

[sirilaf]

[sirilaf]

Melancholia II (2015), Fatma Bucak 

[sirilaf]

I can hear planes passing by, no lights though. I am waiting for you, in the dark night of Mesopotamia. Kurdistand, Irak, 26 March 2016, by Ixone Sadaba

[sirilaf]

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme

[prezygotic]

YOUSSEF NABIL - Self-Portrait (2011)

Hand colored gelatin silver print. 26 x 39 cm

[sirilaf]