This season brings together artist films journeying through land, water, toxicity, ritual, and resistance by filmmakers from the Middle East and North Africa – featuring works by Inas Halabi, Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah, Marianne Fahmy, and Noor Abed, Jumana Emil Abboud, Ruba Salameh, Shada Safadi and Manal Mahamid.
The films in this season trace the memories held in bodies and landscapes alike. Poetry threads through silence, storytelling becomes a spell, and conjured worlds arise, alive with resistance and defiance. Moving through shifting geographies and gliding between past and future, each film is a vessel slipping between the seen and the sensed.
These films weave together fictional and nonfictional elements rooted in history, exploring the profound connections to the land and delicate ecosystems scarred by conflict and disaster. They lead us through layered worlds where magic, memory, resistance and ritual coalesce.
Programmed by Angelina Radaković (The Mosaic Rooms, London).
The series is part of the Moderna galerija’s new program Models of Coexistence.
SCREENING PROGRAM
A Night We Held Between, 2024, 30’
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our songs were ready for all wars to come, 2021, 22’
Sunday, 24 August 2025, 19:00
War Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds
Exploring themes of land, control, and resistance, this artist film program focuses on the impact of perpetual colonial realities and counterinsurgency wars on ecologies in the Middle East.
In a region often characterized by sectarian violence, “terrorism,” corruption, and resource exploitation, imaginative ecological practices continue to emerge through the cracks of occupation and war. This film program is part of the multidisciplinary artistic project War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds, which took place between London and Beirut in 2024 and 2025.
Inspired by the book War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East (2023) by Umut Yıldırım and extending beyond it, the wider program brought together experimental and artistic practices which resist and push back against the incapacitating effects of this violence.
Jumana Emil Abboud | Smuggling Lemons (2006, 20’18”)
Ruba Salameh | Yamm (Open Sea) (2016, 9’17”)
Shada Safadi | Wind Farm (2023, 2’57”)
Manal Mahamid | From Akka to Gaza (2024, 4′)
In Smuggling Lemons (2006, 20’18”), Jumana Emil Abboud repetitively records the social reality and exhausting procedure of crossing the checkpoints between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Making several journeys through the checkpoints, she smuggles the fruits of an entire lemon tree from its garden in Jerusalem. By presenting the landscape and the monotony of the journey, the video records the way that repression works, and the lemons that the artist carries in her arms and on her body take on different connotations.
Yamm (Open Sea) (2016, 9’17”) is a video work that captures Ruba Salameh’s persistent return to a bus stop in Salah Al-din Street in East Jerusalem – where a huge billboard of the sea of Gaza overlooks the waiting passengers and passersby. The video captures the heart of everyday life in Jerusalem punctuated by the still Gazan sea, animated by film fragments from the beach at Tantoura, a Palestinian village demolished in 1948. Haunted by the notion of its very disappearance, the fading paper, its wear and tear, the marks of time and human intervention symbolically speak of erasure, separation, memory, impossibility and resistance.
Wind Farm (2023, 2’57”) is part of Shada Safadi’s ongoing research “Birds that no longer want to migrate.” The project sheds light on the practices of control imposed in the occupied Golan Heights, with new “isolation walls” being built under the guise of green energy. In 2019, an influential Israeli company proposed a plan to build a wind farm of 110 turbines along the ceasefire line, of which 32 occupy around 3,674 dunams (or 367.4 hectares) of Syrian farmers’ land in the villages of Majdal Shams, Masada, and Buqata. To date, 41 wind turbines have been installed. Located on the bird migration line across the Golan Heights, these turbines pose serious threats to the ecologies of humans and non-human species, including the fertile land, bats, bees and birds, such as the Golan eagle. Sound design by Busher Kanj Abu Saleh.
From Akka to Gaza (2024, 4’) by Manal Mahamid metaphorically portrays Palestinian resistance, depicting individuals as mythical creatures overcoming all terrestrial, maritime, and aerial barriers, as well as other borders imposed by Zionist colonialism. The film draws powerful parallels between the history of displacement and resilience, illustrating transformative journeys that challenge socio-political and physical obstacles.
War-Torn Ecologies: Resistant Worlds is curated by Odessa Warren, Reem Shadid (Beirut Art Center), Siegrun Salmanian and Angelina Radaković (The Mosaic Rooms).
Wednesday, 24 September 2025, 18:00
Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah
And still, it remains, 2023, 28’
Inas Halabi
We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction, 2019, 11’57”
Wednesday, 29 October 2025, 18:00
Marianne Fahmy
Magic Carpet Land, 2020, 11’11”
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What Things May Come, 2019, 13’
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Laws of Ruin, 2024, 14’
