Inas Halabi, We No Longer Prefer Mountains (still), 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Inas Halabi, We No Longer Prefer Mountains (still), 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Inas Halabi, Hopscotch (5.1 sound installation / 2.5 hours looped), production 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.
Inas Halabi, We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction (still from video installation), 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
The Brookline Arts Center presents the solo exhibition To A Returning Cloud by Inas Halabi from July 20 until October 26 2024.
To a Returning Cloud explores the relationship between landscape, systems of power and colonialism’s ongoing effect on the natural and urban environment. Combining film and sound, the works on display examine territories and events haunted by the impacts of colonialism, racism, and their imprint on land, human and other-than-human forms of life. Exploring many issues, the exhibition is an instigation to think collectively about the dilemmas faced by the dispossessed in relation to the modes of representation and visibility.
Works in the exhibition are:
Hopscotch (The Centre of the Sun’s Radiance)
5.1 sound installation / 2.5 hours looped
Takes listeners on a journey across two continents- Africa and Europe- to explore the ways in which histories of labour tied to the train’s development are embedded in the landscape. Through field recordings, oral histories and radio broadcasts, captured near the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo and a former UMHK-owned uranium refinery in Olen, Belgium, the project examines how the (colonial) past continues in the present, albeit under different guises. Borrowing the title of Julio Cortázar’s eponymous novel, Hopscotch shifts between chapters whose beginnings and ends are never the same, disrupting the notion of linear time that structures both historical and train-based narratives.
We No Longer Prefer Mountains
Video Installation — 96 mins
Takes place in the Druze town of Dalyet el Carmel, in northern Palestine, pulling the viewer into a surreal world of geographic isolation, shrouded mysticism and a locale shaped by co-optation, coercion, and control. Weaving together intimate engagements with members of the community, in shared domestic spaces and outdoor environments, the film sets out to explore how the inner politics of the Druze have been controlled and reshaped as a result of the establishment of Israel in 1948. The film is informed by the landscape theory (fûkeiron), a Japanese Avant Garde film movement in the 60s whereby the filmmakers posited that filming the everyday surroundings reveal the oppressive and repressively isolating landscapes and the powers at play.
We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction
Video installation / 11:57 min
We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction has an outward subject and an inward one. Via a gear-shifting combination of conversation, interview and expressive location footage, it probes the possible burial of nuclear waste in the South of the West Bank. But as the footage cycles between fragmented conversations with a nuclear physicist and landscapes that are uneasily underscored by what we hear (and sometimes tinted an ill-omened red), another context emerges. In various ways, the delivery of information is thwarted, withheld, or delayed , and the film comes to turn on issues of representation and conveyance. The isotope Cesium 137, invisible but deadly, could be seen as a synecdoche for a more ungraspable invisibility – the systemic networks of power and control in the region – and this work as a meditation on how to account for the un-filmable but inexorable.
Inas Halabi (b. 1988, Palestine) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her practice is concerned with how social and political forms of power are manifested and the impact that overlooked or suppressed histories have on contemporary life. She holds an MFA from Goldsmiths College in London and completed the De Ateliers artist residency in 2019. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Hot Docs Film Festival, Toronto (2023), de Appel, Amsterdam (2023), Showroom London (2022), Europalia Festival, Brussels (2021), Silent Green Betonhalle, Berlin (2021); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2020); and Film at Lincoln Center, USA (2020). She lives and works between Palestine and the Netherlands.
The Brookline Arts Center (BAC) is a visual arts center committed to bringing the community meaningful experiences in the arts through classes, exhibitions and outreach. In addition to regular classes, the BAC hosts exhibitions, events, community outreach programs, workshops, art, and more.