The online screening programme will feature the work of 21 artists exploring links between the two regions.
Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) has announced Genealogies in the Middle East and Latin America, an online screening programme featuring 21 artists and collectives from the Middle East and Latin America working in film and video.
Taking place from June 1 to July 11, the project explores historical and contemporary relationships between artists in the two regions in order to consider their shared histories of colonisation and the close links developed through several cycles of migration over the last 150 years from nations such as Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq to countries in Central America, Peru, Chile, Mexico as well as Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela.
The impact of this shared history on their respective cultures, although the circumstances varied historically and regionally, is reflected in the transnational territorial subjectivities of many of the participating artists and their work.
Jointly organised by Sharjah Art Foundation and curator Anna Goetz, the project was initiated to reflect on different spheres of influence that have shaped artists in the two regions over the years. The project’s initiator, Goetz, invited the artists to ponder over what has influenced their thinking and ways of working. What were the immediate and specific societal relations, the everyday living and working conditions and the central sources of inspiration that have shaped them and their practice?
The films will be screened via the Foundation’s virtual screening platform. Over 21 days, the online screening programme Genealogies in the Middle East and Latin America will release 21 short and feature-length experimental and documentary videos.
Each moving-image work will be available for 21 days.
Following the format of a chain letter, artists were invited to nominate other artists with a work of theirs. Thus, the programme’s threads unfold along narratives revealed by the artists’ personal accounts, which provide critical alternative perspectives and insights.