Film Screenings at Etihad Museum - Wandering the Sea
Last October I wrote about a 6 part film series programmed by me for Etihad Museum, part of Contemporary Histories, a season of cultural events at Etihad Museum in Dubai, programmed by Alserkal Advisory and commissioned by Dubai Culture.
Since then, my involvement in working on 6 film nights was reduced to 2, the rest of the film nights are programmed by someone else.
The second film night programmed by me is happening on March 17 at 7.30pm. It includes two films by artists screening back to back, Terrain Ahead by Anna Kipervaser, Majd Alloush and Primary Organs by Michael John Whelan. Both were filmed in the UAE, about the coastline and maritime cultures, and the impact of climate change and capitalism.
I showed Terrain Ahead last May at CineMAS 2022 in Abu Dhabi, also part of a films by artists line up, and glad to have a second opportunity to show the film, this time in Dubai. As for Primary Organs, it has not had a public screening in Dubai since its scheduled and cancelled screening in March, we all know what happened. So this too is a second opportunity for people to see it. Saira Ansari wrote this about Whelan’s film for Art Monthly, August 2020:
Whelan doesn’t offer either simplistic hope or reductive homage, but instead a melancholic reminder of the tense relationship between progress and erasure.
The screening on March 17 is free to attend, but you must register in advance.
TERRAIN AHEAD
Directors: Anna Kipervaser, Majd Alloush
2021, 20 min, No dialogue
Terrain Ahead is a hybrid analog-digital experimental documentary exploring the trajectory of human impact on coastlines in the United Arab Emirates.
The overarching question of Terrain Ahead is around visibility and invisibility, what is and can be documented and shared, and that which cannot.
PRIMARY ORGANS
Director: Michael John Whelan
2021, 43 min, Arabic with English subtitles
'Primary Organs' intertwines diverse but connected vignettes from historic and contemporary maritime cultures of the Arabian Peninsula: a diver travels to sites once visited by Jacques Cousteau during his 1954 survey for oil, an abandoned pearl diving village built from coral is a site of simultaneous archaeological exploration and restoration, and retired fishermen sing endangered songs once used to add rhythm to their work.
Central to the film is the representation of coral as an eco-marker of our interspecies dependency: the marine biologist keeps samples alive in a laboratory aquarium, a village is built entirely from it, and as a votive gesture a diver brings a piece of it to a former oil survey site.
Through its slow-paced language and choreographed underwater scenes, Primary Organs explores local relationships to the sea, echoes of petro-state neocolonialism, and the roles of complicity and gesture within our climate crisis. Punctuating this journey is the voice of the marine biologist who shares her poetic observations and trepidation for the future.