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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.
Hopinka’s video Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021) traverses the memory of a place and space visited by the artist. Employing an original syntax of storytelling, the artist interweaves scattered and reassembled landscapes with layers of captured audio, poetic text, and music. A rhythmic account of the spiritual implications of colonial plunder, Hopinka’s fluid reflections transmute ideas of spiritual malleability tied to land, sky, sea, myth, place, and personhood.
About the Filmmaker:
Sky Hopinka’s work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, and language designs as containers of culture, often expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media. His video, photo, and text work have been exhibited and screened internationally at festivals, museums, and art centers, including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, the FRONT Triennial, and the 14th Gwangju Biennial. He was a 2022 MacArther Fellow and winner of the 2023 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel.
- Year2021
- Runtime4 minutes
- LanguageEnglish
- CountryUnited States
- Subtitle LanguageEnglish
- DirectorSky Hopinka
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.
Hopinka’s video Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021) traverses the memory of a place and space visited by the artist. Employing an original syntax of storytelling, the artist interweaves scattered and reassembled landscapes with layers of captured audio, poetic text, and music. A rhythmic account of the spiritual implications of colonial plunder, Hopinka’s fluid reflections transmute ideas of spiritual malleability tied to land, sky, sea, myth, place, and personhood.
About the Filmmaker:
Sky Hopinka’s work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, and language designs as containers of culture, often expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media. His video, photo, and text work have been exhibited and screened internationally at festivals, museums, and art centers, including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, the FRONT Triennial, and the 14th Gwangju Biennial. He was a 2022 MacArther Fellow and winner of the 2023 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel.
- Year2021
- Runtime4 minutes
- LanguageEnglish
- CountryUnited States
- Subtitle LanguageEnglish
- DirectorSky Hopinka