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With artists Basma AlSharif, Coleman Collins, Sky Hopinka, Emily Jacir, Joe Namy, and Oraib Toukan, ON LANDSCAPES, RUINS AND PATTERNS OF REMEMBERING is a program of video works that unfold a politics of image-making, reviewing and recounting social and cultural histories as they are explored through contemporary frameworks. The program is prompted by a work from the ArteArchive—Toukan’s performance video, Remind me to Remember to Forget (2006), after Mahmoud Darwish’s 1982 prose poem, “Memory for Forgetfulness.” The artist proposes to reverse the act of writing and the will to remember, consequently dispersing the written word and suspending it in memory and reimagination.
Revisiting Toukan’s video eighteen years later, in a global context that remains anxious with war and impending invasions, Remind me to Remember to Forget is revisited in conversation with works by Alsharif, Collins, Hopinka, Jacir, and Namy. Through minimalist experiments and lyrical narratives the works address profound violences of colonial erasure of land and people, the legacies of exile and dispersion, and our relationship to objects and images when only image and replica remain.
In their distinct structural explorations of cycles and repetitions, these works deal with the promises and devastating blunders of modernity. They connect to land, time, and space in a contemporary world charged with a renewed authoritarian tendency that swings from guise and symbolism to blatant and annihilating power. Between lived experiences and replicated environments, these works present a receding natural world, real and imagined sites, and archives that render the architectures of a modern time swept up in a coup of capitalist developments and techno-autocratic fascist regimes.
ON LANDSCAPES, RUINS AND PATTERNS OF REMEMBERING is curated by Fwaz Kabra and is co-presented by ArteEast and e-flux. This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. A selection of works from the program will be screened in-person at e-flux on Tuesday, September 24, followed by a Q&A between Emily Jacir, Coleman Collins and Fawz Kabra. For more details about the in-person screening on September 24, visit e-flux.com. The full program will be screened online on artearchive.org from September 19 - 29.
A performance video referencing Mahmoud Darwish’s 1982 classic “Memory for Forgetfulness”. Made 18 years ago the work is part of a duology titled Counting Memories following the summer of 2006 when Israel launched a war on both Gaza and Lebanon one month apart. The video reveres the act of writing and the will to remember. In Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s words (2007): “(Pushing) memory into the realm of performance and allowing for its willful suspension in the imagination as fantasy and, quite possibly, as future”.
About the Filmmaker:
Oraib Toukan is an artist, writer, and educator. She is an EUME fellow at the Transregional Forum, Berlin and was a Clarendon scholar at the University of Oxford, Ruskin School of Art where she completed her PhD in 2019. Until 2015 she was head of the Arts Division and Media Studies Program at Bard College at Al Quds University. Toukan is author of the book Sundry Modernism: Materials for a Study of Palestinian Modernism (2017).
- Year2006
- Runtime2 minutes
- LanguageArabic
- CountryJordan
- DirectorOraib Toukan
With artists Basma AlSharif, Coleman Collins, Sky Hopinka, Emily Jacir, Joe Namy, and Oraib Toukan, ON LANDSCAPES, RUINS AND PATTERNS OF REMEMBERING is a program of video works that unfold a politics of image-making, reviewing and recounting social and cultural histories as they are explored through contemporary frameworks. The program is prompted by a work from the ArteArchive—Toukan’s performance video, Remind me to Remember to Forget (2006), after Mahmoud Darwish’s 1982 prose poem, “Memory for Forgetfulness.” The artist proposes to reverse the act of writing and the will to remember, consequently dispersing the written word and suspending it in memory and reimagination.
Revisiting Toukan’s video eighteen years later, in a global context that remains anxious with war and impending invasions, Remind me to Remember to Forget is revisited in conversation with works by Alsharif, Collins, Hopinka, Jacir, and Namy. Through minimalist experiments and lyrical narratives the works address profound violences of colonial erasure of land and people, the legacies of exile and dispersion, and our relationship to objects and images when only image and replica remain.
In their distinct structural explorations of cycles and repetitions, these works deal with the promises and devastating blunders of modernity. They connect to land, time, and space in a contemporary world charged with a renewed authoritarian tendency that swings from guise and symbolism to blatant and annihilating power. Between lived experiences and replicated environments, these works present a receding natural world, real and imagined sites, and archives that render the architectures of a modern time swept up in a coup of capitalist developments and techno-autocratic fascist regimes.
ON LANDSCAPES, RUINS AND PATTERNS OF REMEMBERING is curated by Fwaz Kabra and is co-presented by ArteEast and e-flux. This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. A selection of works from the program will be screened in-person at e-flux on Tuesday, September 24, followed by a Q&A between Emily Jacir, Coleman Collins and Fawz Kabra. For more details about the in-person screening on September 24, visit e-flux.com. The full program will be screened online on artearchive.org from September 19 - 29.
A performance video referencing Mahmoud Darwish’s 1982 classic “Memory for Forgetfulness”. Made 18 years ago the work is part of a duology titled Counting Memories following the summer of 2006 when Israel launched a war on both Gaza and Lebanon one month apart. The video reveres the act of writing and the will to remember. In Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s words (2007): “(Pushing) memory into the realm of performance and allowing for its willful suspension in the imagination as fantasy and, quite possibly, as future”.
About the Filmmaker:
Oraib Toukan is an artist, writer, and educator. She is an EUME fellow at the Transregional Forum, Berlin and was a Clarendon scholar at the University of Oxford, Ruskin School of Art where she completed her PhD in 2019. Until 2015 she was head of the Arts Division and Media Studies Program at Bard College at Al Quds University. Toukan is author of the book Sundry Modernism: Materials for a Study of Palestinian Modernism (2017).
- Year2006
- Runtime2 minutes
- LanguageArabic
- CountryJordan
- DirectorOraib Toukan