Photo: Mahmoud Alhaj, Fifth Dimension series (2020), Digital Photography

This year's international summer school, jointly organized by Moderna galerija (Ljubljana), the Museum of African Art (Belgrade), and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro (Podgorica), will be opened by a public lecture by Palestinian curator Rana Anani on Sunday, August 24, 2025, at 6 PM at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova.

This talk examines the collapse of boundaries between the arms and entertainment industries, drawing on Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine film series, and Mahmoud Al Haj’s Control Anatomy body of work, and their disturbing echoes in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Farocki traced how, since the Gulf War (1991), militaries have adopted the aesthetics of video games and virtual reality to train soldiers, abstracting violence into clean, distant simulations. Al Haj’s works predicted how this abstraction has become a horrifying reality today, as human lives in Gaza are reduced to data points, thermal images, and surveillances maps.

It argues that the arms industry increasingly draws from the speculative imagination of video games, but also sci-fi media productions, borrowing not just military tools but entire visions of warfare. Technologies, once confined to screens and fiction, now shape real-world killing machines such as talking drones and gamified targeting systems.

One of Black Mirror’s episodes that offers a chilling account for how dehumanizing technologies and narratives enable atrocities, reflects the current reality in Gaza, where entertainment becomes a way to inspire genocide.

Laurie Calhoun’s The End of Military Virtue argues that killing remotely, without risk or confrontation, dissolved the moral responsibility. Soldiers become operators, desensitized and detached, clicking to kill as easily as sending an email or purchasing an online product.

By weaving together artistic critique, popular dystopias, and lived realities in Gaza, this talk asks: What kind of future are we imagining into being? Has science fiction become a blueprint to serve developing these killing machines? And how might we reclaim ethical accountability in an age of mechanized, screen-mediated crimes against humanity?

Rana Anani is a Palestinian curator and writer specializing in visual arts. Her research interests include Palestinian art history, the intersection of visual art with loss, erasure, and archives, as well as the role of art as a tool of solidarity. Anani is currently a fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies and a board member at the Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah. She is the editor of Emergence to Light, the memoir of artist Nabil Anani and Darb Al Ghoul, the memoir of artist Sliman Mansour.