Songs of Memory and Forgetting: Films by Assia Djebar, Inas Halabi, Onyeka Igwe, Tiffany Sia
April 23 @ 7:00 pm– 8:30 pm EDT
Free – $10.00
Wednesday, April 23, 7 pm
Free or suggested donation
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Songs of Memory and Forgetting brings together three short films by Inas Halabi, Onyeka Igwe, and Tiffany Sia, along with Assia Djebar’s essential 1982 anti-colonial classic, The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting. The artists in this screening take on archives and collective memories: where we search for and see them, their possibilities and limitations in crafting a collective future. Part of the public programs of The Image in its Absence, the screening complements the works in the exhibition. Catering, including vegetarian options, will be provided by Ali Baba Kebab.
Attendees: Squeaky Wheel is located in Suite 310 of Tri-Main Center. Take the elevator to the third floor, and head left. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm. Click here to see parking, transportation, and accessibility information.
The screening is funded by Teiger Foundation. The films are courtesy of the artists and Video Data Bank (for Tiffany Sia), Lux (for Onyeka Igwe), and Arsenal (for Assia Djebar).’
Stills
Program
Total duration ~90 minutes. Descriptions courtesy the filmmakers and distributors.
Inas Halabi, Mnemosyne
Digital video, 14 minutes, Arabic with English subtitles, 2016-2017
The title of the work is borrowed from the Titan goddess of memory and the ‘inventress of language and words.’ The starting point for the project is a scar on the forehead of the artist’s grandfather. The scar was a result of a bullet shot in his direction by an Israeli soldier in the late 1940’s. Focusing on the sagas of myth and the construction of memory, members of the same family are filmed individually as they narrate their version of the same event. By scratching the surface of family history, the project explores the scar as a foundational hinge that arranges reality. The project also considers how one can play the role of a historian when the primary source is no longer there. ‘We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.’ As such, recollection becomes an act of transformation rather than reproduction.
Tiffany Sia, What Rules the Invisible
Digital video, 9:50 minutes, English and Cantonese, 2022
What Rules The Invisible is a short film that upends archival travelog footage shot in Hong Kong. Spanning reappropriated amateur footage across the 20th century, the sojourner’s gaze—distanced, distorted and even voyeuristic—shows tropes and patterns. The same shots repeat across decades, from landscape to cityscape to street scenes. Sometimes the footage reveals more about the traveler himself, such as a sequence where the camera curiously tracks the hips and bare legs of women wearing cheongsam crossing a busy intersection. Sia’s essay film studies these travelogs to find indignant subjects glaring back at the camera, or figures on the edges of the frame who appear pixelated and phantasmic, showing the patina of the footage’s circulation. Meanwhile, intertitles intermittently puncture this footage with an oral history of Hong Kong, as told by Sia’s mother who describes colonial police, excrement and hauntings in Kowloon of the postwar era. The viewer is left to imagine these scenes there are no images for.
Onyeka Igwe, No Archive Can Restore You
Digital video, 5:54 minutes, 2020
The former Nigerian Film Unit building was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine, the Colonial Film Unit, stands empty on Ikoyi Road, Lagos, in the shadow of today’s Nigerian Film Corporation building. The rooms are full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. Amongst these cans, a long-lost classic of Nigerian filmmaking, Shehu Umar (1976) was found in 2015. The films housed in this building are hard to see because of their condition, but also perhaps because people do not want to see them. They reveal a colonial residue, that is echoed in walls of the building itself. Taking its title from the 2018 Juliette Singh book, No Archive Can Restore You depicts the spatial configuration of this colonial archive, which lies just out of view, in the heart of the Lagosian cityscape. Despite its invisibility, it contains purulent images that we cannot, will not, or choose not to see. The film imagines ‘lost’ films from the archive in distinctive soundscapes, juxtaposed with images of the abandoned interior and exteriors of the building. This is an exploration into the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial moving images continue to generate.
Assia Djebar, La zerda et les chants de l’oubli (The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting)
16mm film on digital video, 59 minutes, Arabic with English subtitles, 1982
For La zerda et les chants de l’oubli, Algerian writer Assia Djebar changed her field and recapitulated the colonization of the Maghreb using French newsreels. Through editing, the film seeks in these “images of a killing gaze” the truth they precisely don’t reveal, the “resistance behind the mask.” The soundtrack combines polyphonic chants and experimental music to create a furious elegy to colonial violence. Djebar creates a complex picture of Algeria’s colonial history, focusing particularly on the role and portrayal of women during this period. Screenplay by Malek Alloula.
Biographies of the filmmakers
Algerian-born, Muslem raised, Paris-educated, Assia Djebar (1936- 2015) tackled all genres: poetry, plays, short-stories, novels and essays. In her books Djebar explored the struggle for social emancipation and the Muslim woman’s world in its complexities. Several of her works deal with the impact of the war on women’s mind. She wrote, directed, and edited her own films, winning the Biennale prize at the 1979 Venice Film Festival with her very first attempt, La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua (The nouba or “ritual” festival of the Women of Mt. Chenoua). She staged her own plays and both translated and directed the plays of others (Amiri Baraka’s, for example). In 2000, she authored an operatic libretto, Filles d’Ismaël dans le vent et la tempête (Daughters of Ishmael, through wind and storm). Based on her 1991 narrative on the life of the Prophet, Far from Medina, this oratorio was performed to excellent reviews in Rome and at the Palermo Arts Festival. A second version, in classical Arabic this time, is commissioned for future performance in Holland. Djebar is one of North Africa’s most famous and influential writers, and was elected to the Académie française on June 16, 2005, the first writer from the Maghreb to achieve such recognition. She won the following awards: Peace Prize of Frankfurt Book Fair (2000); International Prize of Palmi (Italy); Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for Literature (Boston, MA); International Literary Neustadt Prize (1996); International Critics Prize, Biennale of Venice, for the film “La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua.” (08/18) – Biography via Women Make Movies
Inas Halabi (b.1988, Palestine) is an Artist/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. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Luleå Biennial (2024), Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (2023), de Appel Amsterdam (solo 2023), Showroom London (solo 2022), Europalia Festival, Brussels (2021), Silent Green Betonhalle, Berlin (2021); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2020); and Film at Lincoln Center, USA (2020). Her recent work has been supported by Amarte, Amsterdam Fonds Voor de Kunst (AFK), Mondriaan Fund, and Sharjah Art Foundation. She lives and works between Palestine and the Netherlands.
Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation. She is born and based in London, UK. In her non-fiction video work Onyeka uses dance, voice, archives, sound design and text to create structural ‘figure-of-eights’, a format that exposes a multiplicity of narratives. The work comprises of untieable strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound; in the work as much in life, what is said and what we see are not always the same thing. www.onyekaigwe.com
Tiffany Sia (b. 1988) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. Sia’s films have screened at TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, and elsewhere. She has had solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Maxwell Graham Gallery, New York; and Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna. Sia is the author of On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024), a compendium of essays that makes a case for fugitive, exilic cinema, moving beyond national identity and the politics of place as a critical lens. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared in Film Quarterly, October, and more. The recipient of the Baloise Art Prize in 2024, Sia has given talks at Dia Art Foundation, Stanford University, and has taught at Cooper Union. The artist and filmmaker’s work at its core challenges genre. Working across mediums, her multidisciplinary practice materializes across multiple forms from films, video sculptures, artist books, scholarly essays, and more. Sia’s work blends nonfiction with poetics and theoretical inquiry. Her formal explorations confront questions about the representation of memory and place, relating especially the imaginaries of exceptional and irregular polities beyond the national (from Hong Kong to elsewhere). Throughout, her conceptual focus remains in the struggle to represent historical time, geography, and the limits of official records. Sia currently lives and works in New York.
