Monday 01.21.08 -- Videos from Lebanon [Part 1] -- Curated by Christine Tohme:

[Lamia Joreige+Lina Saneh+Roy Samaha]

Contents:
1. About This Monday 01.21.08
2. About the videos and the artists:
2.1 Video for the end of time / Roy Samaha
2.2 I Had a Dream, Mom... / Lina Saneh
2.3 A Journey / Lamia Joreige
3. About Christine Tohme

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1. About This Monday 01.21.08

What: Screening/ Discussion with Lamia Joreige
When: 7:30pm
Where: 16beaver, 4th Floor
Who: Free and Open to all

Please join us this Monday evening for the screening of part 1 of 3 that Christine curated for the Riwaq Biennale in Palestine. (We will be showing the next two parts in the coming weeks. TBA.)

We are also very lucky to have a discussion with Lamia who happens to be in New York this week.

to view the full program ... please go to ...

http://www.riwaqbiennale.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=98&Itemid=135

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2. About the videos in the First Session:

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2.1- Video for the end of time / Roy Samaha

“Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds, a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. A long phrase on the cello, infinitely slow, magnifies with love and reverence the eternity of this powerful and gentle word, “which the years can never efface”. Clarinet solo. The abyss is time, with its sorrows and its weariness. The birds are the opposite of time. They are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows and joyful songs!”
(Quartet for the end of time, Olivier Messiaen, liner notes)
I know nothing has ever lasted but the gaze into which it all burns. I know nothing has ever escaped the burning.
[Video, 10 minutes, 2006]

Bio
Born in Beirut in 1978, Roy Samaha completed a Masters degree in film studies at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK), Lebanon. His videos include Pharmakon (2002), and the triptych Untitled for Several Reasons (2003), Pink White Green Black: Noise/Silence Insinuated (2005), and Video for the End of Time (2006). His work was screened at the Singapore Biennale in 2006, Beirut DC’s Ayam Beirut Al Cinema’iya festival in 2006, Disorientation at the House of World Cultures, Berlin in 2003, Videobrasil, Sao Paolo in 2003, Home Works II, Beirut in 2003, and the Lebanese film festival "..né.à Beyrouth" in 2002.

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2.2- I Had a Dream, Mom... / Lina Saneh

Robert Abirached has often told me that it is in the effervescence
of the irrational, caught at the most intimate point of individual
experience, that one must perhaps seek an alternative humanism,
that is, a possible basis for a different order.
One day, one night, rather, I have a dream; I tell it to my mother;
she understands. She throws the ball back into my court; I fail
to catch it...

[Video, 45 minutes, 2006, Arabic with english subtitles]

Bio
Lina Saneh was born in Beirut in 1966. She studied theater at the Lebanese University in Beirut and the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. She has written, directed, and acted in numerous plays, including Who’s Afraid of Representation? (2005), Biokhraphia (2002), Extrait d’état civil (2000), Ovrira (1997), and Les Chaises (1996). She made her first video, I Had a Dream, Mom... in 2006. She is currently assistant professor at the Institut d’Etudes Scéniques et Audio-Visuelles (IESAV) at Saint Joseph University (USJ) in Beirut.

Break

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2.3- A Journey / Lamia Joreige

A Journey follows my grand mother Tati Rose, as her personal story meets the collective History of the Middle East. Born in Jerusalem in 1910, she moved to Beirut in 1930 to get married. Her family, among whom Aunt Marie her sister, was forced into exile and left Yaffa in 1948 to take refuge in Lebanon. Alternating documents, Super 8mm films, photographs, interviews, landscapes and voice over, I trigger a reflection on history and on the conflicts in the region, as well as a reflection on time, disappearance and loss.
[Video, 41 minutes, 2006, French and Arabic with English / Arabic / French subtitles]

Bio
Born in 1972 in Beirut, Lebanon, Lamia Joreige studied cinema and painting at Rhode Island School of Design, USA, from which she graduated with a BFA in 1995.
Among her works: Je d’Histoires, interactive video installation 2006 - A Journey, video documentary 2006 - Objects of war 1, 2, 3, 4, video & objects installation 1999-2006 - Time and the Other, exhibition and book 2004 - Untitled 1997-2003, video installation - Here and Perhaps Elsewhere, documentary 2003 - Ici et peut-être ailleurs, short fiction 2003 - Replay (bis), video, fiction 2002 - Replay, video installation, 2000 - The Displacement, video-stills installation 1998-2000. Her works have been presented in many venues and festivals around the world.

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3. About Christine Tohme

Christine Tohme is a Beirut-based curator. In 1994 she was one of the founding members of Ashkal Alwan (The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts), a non-profit arts organisation, which she has since directed. From the outset, Ashkal Alwan has been committed to fostering and developing artistic endeavours across a wide range of disciplines and media, including installation art, video art, photography, performance and publication. In 2001, she conceived of, and initiated Home Works: A Forum on Cultural Practices, with three editions so far. This multidisciplinary event is intended as a public arena for artists, students, curators, intellectuals and cultural practitioners from Lebanon and abroad to engage in critical reflection and debate.
In 2006, Tohme was the recipient of the annual Prince Claus Award. She is currently completing an MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College, London.

http://www.ashkalalwan.org/