Cinematic Counter-Archives of Palestine: Memory, Erasure, and Resistance
This program centers on the role of film as a counter-archive under conditions of genocide and Israeli apartheid, examining the systematic erasure of Palestinian culture in its many forms. Featuring A Night We Held Between (2024, Noor Abed), letter to a friend (2019, Emily Jacir), Electrical Gaza (2015, Rosalind Nashashibi), and There Was Nothing Here Before (2024, Yvann Yagchi), the screenings at eikones this fall will be followed by discussions with the filmmakers, foregrounding cinema as a space of memory, resistance, and reimagining.

Organized and chaired by: David Bucheli (eikones), Aïcha Revellat (eikones), Ute Holl (Media Studies), Falestin Naïli (Near and Middle Eastern Studies), Lorena Rizzo (African Studies), and Peter Burleigh (English Seminar). 

22 October: letter to a friend (2019, 43min). Guest: Emily Jacir, Chair: Aïcha Revellat
13 November: Electrical Gaza (2015, 18min). Guest: Rosalind Nashashibi, Chair: Falestin Naïli
20 November: A Night We Held Between (2024, 30min). Guest: Noor Abed, Chair: Chus Martínez
8 December: Avant, il n’y avait rien / There Was Nothing Here Before (2024, 71min). Guest: Yvann Yagchi

Noor Abed is a Palestinian artist whose practice unfolds at the intersection of performance, moving image, and film. Abed attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in Νew York in 2015-16, and the Home Workspace Program (HWP) at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut in 2016-17. She received her BA from the International Academy of Arts in Palestine and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. She was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (2014) and a fellow in documenta (13)’s “Department of Maybe Educatiοn and Public Programs” in Kassel, Germany. A finalist and a third prize-winner in the 2014 Young Artist Award, she was awarded the March Project residency and commission from Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE) in 2016. Abed was awarded a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (France) in 2018 and a fellowship at the Raw Material Company in Dakar (Senegal) in 2019. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the “School of Intrusions,” an educational platform in Ramallah, Palestine. Between 2022 and 2024, she held a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, where she completed the film A Night We Held Between.

A Night We Held Between centers on a original audio recording called «Song for the Fighters» and found by the filmmaker in the sonic archive of the Popular Art Centre in Palestine. Filmed among ancient sites near Jerusalem—caves, carved hollows, underground passages, and rugged valleys—the porous landscape becomes a stage for rituals of mourning, remembrance, and resistance. The grainy 16mm images themselves resemble archival fragments with an uncertain temporal index. Accompanied by a haunting montage of whispering sounds, voices, and the archival song, the film combines static close-ups of mineral formations with kinetic choreographies of its protagonists (and the camera), further complicating the temporal dynamics of this labyrinthine memoryscape.

Chus Martínez is a curator, art historian and Head of the Institute Art Gender Nature at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. She serves as curator of Ocean Space in Venice, a space initiated by TBA21–Academy, and at the Vuslat Foundation in Istanbul. At the Institute Art Gender Nature, Martínez currently leads The Gender’s Factor, a research project examining the role of education in promoting gender equality in the arts. She is a board member of CIMAM (International Committee for Museums) and serves on the advisory boards of numerous international art institutions, including Castello di Rivoli in Turin, De Appel in Amsterdam, and the German Historical Museum in Berlin. Previously, she was Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York and Head of Department at dOCUMENTA (13). Prior to that, she held positions as Chief Curator at MACBA in Barcelona and Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein.