What then, what now: a night of Palestinian films & discussion

November 19, 2024 | 7:30pm TO 9:30pm

Conversation

Screening

Location: Oxy Arts, 4757 York Blvd LA CA 90042
Gallery open with light bites at 7:30 pm; screening at 8:00 pm. Seating first come first served.

"My own understandings of images were amplified in the aftermaths of several prior disproportionate onslaughts on Palestinians residing in the Israeli-besieged Gaza Strip. Through the overall Palestinian historic experience of violence, I learned that visibility does not presuppose anything. The Palestinian struggle is painfully observable, glaringly visible, and yet it always feels like it cannot be seen. Over time I conditioned myself to find meaning in the lexicon of the Arabic language on conscience and images. I dove into pictures to look—no longer for damning evidence of injustice, but for meaning in how we come to know things."
– Oraib Toukan, Twenty-One Sunsets

Featuring a screening of two short films of Oraib Toukan, Via Dolorosa (2021) and Offing (2021), followed by a conversation with Joanne Nucho, Kristine Khouri, and Randa Jarrar, this program focuses on Palestinian cultural production and the tension that Toukan explores between the hypervisibility and invisibilizing of the Palestinian experience.

This event is free and open to the public. Presented in connection with the Oxy Arts exhibition Invisibility: Powers & Perils, and in partnership with the Occidental College chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Co-sponsored by Occidental College's Media Arts & Culture and Critical Theory & Social Justice departments.

Image credit: Oraib Toukan, Via Dolorosa, 2021. Image study in a single-channel video (color, sound). Courtesy the artist

Still from the film Via Dolorosa by Oraib Toukan, abstract archival shot of a person's head and another person's arm

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER

Oraib Toukan

Oraib Toukan is an artist, writer, and educator. She is a EUME scholar at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin in collaboration with the Harun Farocki Institute and was a Clarendon scholar at the University of Oxford, Ruskin School of Art where she completed her PhD in 2019. Through a diverse body of work that probes photography, film, and text, she explores alternative, native, and vernacular understandings of images, often drawing from the rich lexicon of the Arabic language.

IN CONVERSATION

Randa Jarrar

Kristine Khouri

Joanne Nucho

Randa Jarrar is the author of the memoir Love Is An Ex-Country, the novel A Map of Home, and the collection of stories Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. She is a filmmaker and actor who has appeared in independent films and on the A24 TV shows Ramy and #1 Happy Family USA. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award, an American Book Award, and others. She lives in Los Angeles.

randajarrar.com

Kristine Khouri is a researcher with a background in Arab cultural history and art history. Her interests focus on the history of arts circulation, collection, exhibition and infrastructure in the Middle East and North Africa as well as archival practice and knowledge dissemination. Khouri is a member of the board of the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut.

Kristine Khouri is the co-researcher and co-curator with Rasha Salti, of Past Disquiet, a long-term research project that began in 2008 and was transformed into a documentary and archival exhibition that has been exhibited internationally since 2015. They are coeditors of Past Disquiet: Artists, International Solidarity, and Museums in Exile (Warsaw, 2018).

Joanne Randa Nucho is an anthropologist and filmmaker. Her book, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services and Power (Princeton University Press, 2016), is about how fragmented infrastructures in Lebanon — things like private electricity generator subscription systems and social welfare managed by religious-affiliated institutions— help to produce and recalibrate notions of sectarian belonging and exclusion, and how people challenge or contest these channels. She has written extensively on the erosion of public and collective goods, from decentralized solar energy and electricity fragmentation in Lebanon, to a new project about the emergence of home backup battery systems and microgrids in the context of renewable energy transition in California.

Her films have screened in various contexts including the London International Documentary Film Festival in 2008, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 2017. Her feature length experimental documentary, The Narrow Streets of Bourj Hammoud, engages with the experiences of residents of Bourj Hammoud, a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, through drawings and stories. An associated website, Mapping Bourj Hammoud, features the drawings made by participants throughout the production of the film. Her short experimental film, Gigi (from 9-5) from 2001, is part of filmmaker Miranda July’s feminist film collection Joanie4Jackie, now held in the Getty research collection.

https://www.joannenucho.com/