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The Landing

Akram Zaatari

2019 01:03:00 LebanonColorStereo16:9HD video

Description

Whether they inhabit the desert or are lost in it, three men are clearly confronted to the ruins of modern times. They are explorers or players or performers of times past. Their encounters, their moves, their assessment of location take the form of an acoustic sounding of space. Filmed in Shaabiyat al Ghurayfah in Sharjah, a repertoire of simple gestures playfully engages with structure, space, movement, threshold, surveillance and perspective. Cables, sewage pipes, tubes, shovels, kitchen tools, electric air blowers and even a helicopter landing on site are all deployed in this film for their sonic rather than narrative potential—creating refractions, confrontations and transformations in a broken of folded narrative.

Music and Cast: Sharif Sehnaoui, Ali Hout, Abed Kobeissy

Cinematography: Talal Khoury

Sound Design: Victor Bresse

About Akram Zaatari

Akram Zaatari is an artist who lives and works in Beirut. He has been exploring Lebanon's postwar condition through collecting testimonies and various documents, notably on the mediation of territorial conflicts and wars through television, and the logic of Resistance in the context of the current geographical division of the Middle East.

Co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (Beirut), he based his recent work on collecting, studying, and archiving a particular collection on the Middle East, notably studying the work of Lebanese photographer Hashem el Madani (1928-) as a register of social relationships and of photographic practices.

In addition to his work as an artist, Zaatari is also the curator of the Radical Closure box set, which includes his work In This House.

Grand winner of the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil.

Represented in the Lebanese Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.