Join us for a special screening of two powerful films rooted in the landscape, memory, and folklore of Palestine: A Night We Held Between (2024) and our songs were ready for all wars to come (2021) on Saturday, 7 June 2025 at 18:00 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM.
Following the screening, artist and filmmaker Noor Abed will be in conversation with curator Angelina Radaković.
A Night We Held Between (2024)
16mm film, 30 min, w/ sound
Description:
The film centers around “Song for The Fighters,” which was found in the sonic archive of the Popular Art Center in Palestine. Through the layers of the song, in a labyrinth of sounds and sites, the film conjures history as a permanent present tense, a collective and imaginative act.
The film was shot in ancient sites in Palestine – caves, carved holes, underground passages, and wild valleys – and the land becomes our main character. It traverses beyond the first layer of visibility to reveal a vast, hidden world similar to the one we know. Throughout the film, scenes intertwine rituals and narratives of community and resistance into everyday representations of social life in Palestine, thus emphasizing the role of collective rhythmic movement and the potential impact that shared feelings can evoke in creating and sustaining a community.
our songs were ready for all wars to come (2021)
super 8mm film, 20 min, w/ sound
Description:
Presenting choreographed scenes based on documented folktales from Palestine, the film aims to create a new aesthetic form to re-awaken latent stories created around water wells and their connection to communal rituals about notions of disappearance, mourning, and death. our songs were ready for all the wars to come explores the critical stance of “folklore” as a source of knowledge, and its possible connection to alternative social and representational models in Palestine. How can “folklore” become a common emancipatory tool for people to overturn dominant discourses, reclaim their history and land, and rewrite reality as they know it?
The only narration in the film is a song, which is sung by the Palestinian singer Maya Khaldi. Its lyrics are a collage of different folk tales. Captured through the media of film and sound, these situated stories are archived and represented, creating a context that explores the capacity for social formation, and the possibility of recalling a memory that is capable of decentralizing images of fixity – a memory that is liberated from monuments.
Bio:
Noor Abed is a Palestinian artist who works at the intersection of performance and film, combining forms of the “staged” and the “documentary.” Her practice examines notions of social choreographies and collective formations, searching through the connection between the notion of “synchrony” and social action. Abed attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in Νew York in 2015-16, and the Home Workspace Program (HWP) at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut 2016-17. She was a fellow at the Raw Material Company in Dakar in 2019, and in 2020 she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed was an assistant curator at documenta fifteen, Kassel 2021-22, an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24, and was awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation/Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant in 2022. Her film A Night We Held Between was selected as a first-prize winner of the e-flux Film Award 2024. Her book Stars at Midday was recently published by Occasional Papers, October 2024.
This screening opens Moderna galerija’s cinematic series entitled From the Land’s Living Pulse journeying through water, myth, ritual, and resistance – woven by the visions of women filmmakers from the Middle East. Curated by Angelina Radaković (The Mosaic Rooms, London)
The series is part of Moderna galerija’s new program Models of Coexistence.
Noor Abed, a study of a stick: movement notations and notes on defiance, 2025 is featured at The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, on view at the Moderna galerija (Museum of Modern Art), Cankarjeva 15, 6 June - 12 October 2025.
