Larissa Sansour

Film screening and artist talk. 23. October 2021, 19:30

Insomnia festival, Tromsø-Gaza days and Small Projects invite you to the screening of four fiction shorts (1h10m), followed by an artist talk and Q&A (50m) with Larissa Sansour, and co-director Søren Lind (online-video-presence). Moderated by Tanja Busse.

The films:

A Space Exodus, 5’, Larissa Sansour, 2009
A Space Exodus quirkily sets up an adapted stretch of Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey in a Middle Eastern political context. The recognizable music scores of the 1968 science fiction film are changed to arabesque chords matching the surreal visuals of Sansour's film.

The film follows the artist herself onto a phantasmagoric journey through the universe echoing Stanley Kubrick's thematic concerns for human evolution, progress and technology. However, in her film, Sansour posits the idea of a first Palestinian into space, and, referencing Armstrong's moon landing, she interprets this theoretical gesture as "a small step for a Palestinian, a giant leap for mankind".
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Nation Estate, film, 9’, Larissa Sansour, 2012
The Nation Estate project consists of a 9-minute sci-fi short film and a photo series offering a clinically dystopian, yet humorous approach to the deadlock in the Middle East.

With its glossy mixture of computer-generated imagery, live actors and an arabesque electronica soundtrack, the Nation Estate film explores a vertical solution to Palestinian statehood. Palestinians have their state in the form of a single skyscraper: the Nation Estate. One colossal high-rise houses the entire Palestinian population - now finally living the high life.
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In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, Larissa Sansour/Søren Lind, 2016
In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain resides in the cross-section between sci-fi, archaeology and politics. Combining live motion and CGI, the film explores the role of myth for history, fact and national identity.

A narrative resistance group makes underground deposits of elaborate porcelain - suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilization. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands. Once unearthed, this tableware will prove the existence of this counterfeit people. By implementing a myth of its own, their work becomes a historical intervention - de facto creating a nation.
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In Vitro, 2-channel film, 28’, Larissa Sansour/Søren Lind, 2019
Commissioned by the Danish Arts Foundation for the 58th Venice Biennale, In Vitro, co-directed with Søren Lind, is a 2-channel Arabic-language sci-fi film filmed in black and white. It is set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above.
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Larissa Sansour (born in East Jerusalem, 1973) is a Palestinian artist who now lives and works in London. Her work, frequently filmic, employs the genre of science fiction as a means of providing an alternative perspective on current social and political issues.
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Soren Lind (b. 1970) is a Danish author, artist, director and scriptwriter. With a background in philosophy, Lind wrote books on mind, language and understanding before turning to art, film and fiction. He has published novels, shorts story collections. His children’s books are translated into several languages.
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The event is co-presented with c/o pop Festival and We Are Europe, supported by Creative Europe.