The Image in its Absence: Azza El-Hassan, Carolina Ebeid, Crystal Z Campbell, Noor Abuarafeh
March 21– May 30
Opening, Friday, March 21, 6–8 pm
Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, 12–5 pm, Wednesdays 12–7pm, and by appointment
On view through May 30, 2025
Free and open to the public
The Image in Its Absence is a group exhibition and public events featuring work on archives that have been displaced and destroyed, and how communities care for and imagine them in their absence. The exhibition includes contemplative essay films, speculative video, poetry, and more, featuring work by Azza El-Hassan, Carolina Ebeid, Crystal Z Campbell, and Noor Abuarafeh.
The works in the exhibition and public programs focus on several different historiographic approaches to how artists address the absence of archives. Azza El-Hassan’s A Remake of a Revolutionary Film reconstructs the last five minutes of Palestinian Film Unit member Hani Jawherieh’s (1939-1976) life before he was killed by Israeli forces in Lebanon. The film is accompanied by The Presence of a Fighter, a projection of seven photographs by Jawherieh, shot in Lebanon in 1969 before he was killed, and that is part of El-Hassan’s long-standing archival work as part of The Void Project. Noor Abuarafeh, in The Moon is a Sun Returning as a Ghost, contemplates the role of exile in collective memories as the follows the fate of artworks that were featured in a 2005 exhibition in Switzerland by Palestinian artists, and which were unable to be returned to Palestine due to challenges by the Israeli government. Crystal Z Campbell, in Go-Rilla Means War, fabulates a new narrative for an unfinished, vinegar damaged, and neglected 35 mm film found on the floor of a now demolished Black Civil Rights movie theater in gentrifying Brooklyn. Carolina Ebeid’s poem, She Got Love: A Circle of Spells for Ana Mendieta, focuses on the testimony and lack of witnesses to the death of the singular Cuban-American artist; its circle is both protective and repellant, seemingly circling Mendieta herself. In the context of the exhibition, the work dives into what is hidden in recorded, official testimony, and what exists beyond it.
The exhibition is accompanied by two public programs, including a screening of short films with Assia Djebar’s The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting, and a reading with Carolina Ebeid.
The exhibition is curated by Ekrem Serdar, who would like to thank Judith Goldman, Laura Marris, the University at Buffalo Poetics program, Zeynep Öz, and Jeff Sherven. Funding is provided by Teiger Foundation.
Images
Left to right: 1. Crystal Z Campbell’s Go-Rilla Means War (2017). Noor Abuarafeh, The Moon Returns as a Ghost (2023). Azza El-Hassan, A Remake of a Revolutionary Film (2019) Noor Abuarafeh, The Moon is a Sun Returning as a Ghost (2023).
Public programs
Wednesday, March 26, 7 pm at Squeaky Wheel
Screening of short films and Assia Djebar’s The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting.
Saturday, April 5, 7 pm at Squeaky Wheel
Reading with Carolina Ebeid
Visiting the exhibition
The exhibition features four video and audio installations, with a total running time of ~40 minutes. Installations feature seatings and room to navigate mobility devices. See Squeaky Wheel’s accessibility information here, and see captioning and subtitle information for individual works below. The exhibition is on view, Tuesday, Thursdays, Fridays, 12–5 pm, with extended hours on Wednesdays, 12–7 pm, and by appointment. To make an appointment, including fully masked visits, email office@squeaky.org .
Works in the Exhibition
Descriptions provided by the artists.
Noor Abuarafeh, The Moon is a Sun Returning as a Ghost
Digital video, Arabic with English subtitles, 10 minutes, 2023
The video is based on research that follows cases of seventeen exhibitions by Palestinian artists, each containing different artworks and exhibited in different countries around the world, the majority of which are considered missing today. The Moon is a Sun Returning as a Ghost follows one of these cases, an exhibition that took place in 2005 in the swiss town of Martigny, the works could not be returned to the artists and were instead moved from a country to another and from one storage facility to another. The video questions how the immateriality of missing objects affects our memory of them, especially in a colonized context where the materiality of the object is constantly in danger of being manipulated, boomed or stolen. The work shows that by poetically liberating historiography from its objecthood, more narratives can emerge that extend beyond the materiality of the object in which it is transmitted orally.
Crystal Z Campbell, Go-Rilla Means War
35mm scanned to digital video by the artist, English with open captions, 20 minutes, 2017
Go-Rilla Means War is a filmic relic of gentrification featuring 35mm film salvaged from a now demolished Black Civil Rights Theater in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After finding the film unfinished and un-canned on the floor of The Slave Theater, Campbell collaborated with the unknown director (presumably amateur filmmaker Judge John Phillips who owned the Slave Theater) to finish the film. A secret Black fraternal organization dominates the visual narrative, accompanied by a parable that binds intersections of development, cultural preservation, and erasure.
Azza El-Hassan, A Remake of a Revolutionary Film
Digital video, Arabic with English subtitles, 7 minutes, 2019
From the personal photo album of Palestinian photographer and cinematographer, Hani Jawherieh, El-Hassan reconstructs the last five minutes of Hani Jawherieh’s life, who was killed while filming in the mountains in Lebanon. The five minutes were featured in Palestine in the Eye (1977) a film made by the Palestine Film Institute to commemorate the life of one of its founders. Yet, forty-two years later, what motivates these images takes on a different turn in A Remake of a Revolutionary Film.
Azza El-Hassan, In the Presence of a Fighter
Digital video, silent, 2:43 minutes looped, 2019
In the Presence of a Fighter is a modern digital installation by Azza El-Hassan of Palestinian fighters portraits which Palestinian photographer, Hani Jawherieh, made in 1969. The portraits were first exhibited by Jawherieh in 1969 as gigantic prints to illustrate the presence and strength of the fighters. These portraits were plundered by the Israeli army in 1982 during the Israeli invasion in Lebanon, and they no longer exist in public spaces. In this modern installation, reflections of the images are projected on the empty wall. The fighters are phantoms who appear only to disappear.
Carolina Ebeid, She Got Love: A Circle of Spells for Ana Mendieta
Poetry on vinyl and read by the artist in digital sound, 2:55 minutes, 2024
She Got Love: a circle of spells for Ana Mendieta is a visual poem that centers the letter O, whose orthographic origins date back to the Phoenician pictograph of the eye. While there was no eye-witness to Mendieta’s death (other than her husband Carl Andre, who was arrested and later acquitted), a witness heard her say “no” as recounted in testimony. The poem then conjurs the O of the witness and the O of no to open up a protective space whose ensorcelling text the viewer and listener can read in a multitude of ways. The work was first installed in the exhibition and concurrent publication A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hyrbid-Literary Collection at Stelo Arts (Portland, OR) in 2024; the exhibition was curated and the publication was edited by Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan, co-directors of De-Canon.
Biographies of the artists
Azza El-Hassan is a visiting professor of practice at the Doha institute for Graduate Studies and an award winning documentary filmmaker. She is the founder of The Void Project, a research and media production project that examines the effect of colonial plundering on the formation of a present visual Arab narrative. Her book The Afterlife of Palestinian Images: Visual Remains and the Archive of Disappearance is considered a groundbreaking study in how colonial violence alters and changes visual objects – which in turn affects how a society and culture relates to its own images.
Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet. She is the author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior (Noemi Press, 2016) and the chapbook Dauerwunder: a brief record of facts (Albion Books, 2023). Her next book Hide is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in winter of 2026. Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, CantoMundo, the NEA, and a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. She is the current Bonderman Assistant Professor of poetry at Brown University. A longtime editor, she currently edits poetry at The Rumpus, as well as the multimedia zine Visible Binary. Carolina grew up in West New York, New Jersey in a Cuban and Palestinian family.
Crystal Z Campbell, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose works center the underloved. Working through archives and omissions, Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken.
Campbell’s works have screened and exhibited internationally: MIT List Visual Arts Center, SFMOMA, Walker Art Center, St. Louis Art Museum, The Drawing Center, Nest, ICA-Philadelphia, MOMA, BLOCK Museum, REDCAT, Artissima, Bemis, Project Row Houses, SculptureCenter, Semana Cinema de Negro in Belo Horizonte, 67th Flaherty Film Seminar, and others. Awards include a NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, Freund Fellowship, Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award, MAP Fund, MacDowell, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, Franklin Furnace, Black Spatial Relics, and a DUKE DocX Fellowship.
Campbell’s writing is featured in two artist books published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic. Campbell is a Visiting Associate Professor in Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo.
Noor Abuarafeh is a Palestinian artist based between Jerusalem and Rotterdam. Her practice spans video, performance, publications, and video installations, with a focus on the themes of memory, history and archives and the complexities of tracking absence. Noor’s videos and performances are based on texts and call the complexity of history into question: how it is formed, constructed, made, perceived, visualized and understood. She asks how all these elements are related and investigates the possibility of representing the past when the past is still present. Her videos and socially-engaged works are based on interviews, workshops and other participatory encounters.
In the past Abuarafeh has shown in solo and group exhibitions at De Appel (2024), Art Jameel (2024), Jakarta Biennale (2024), Frieze Museum (2023), Venice Biennale (2022), Berlin Biennale (2020), and Sharjah Biennale 13 (2017). She also participated in the Off-Biennale Gaudipolis in Budapest (2017) and the Qalandia International in Jerusalem (2018), among others. In 2019, she held her first solo exhibition, The Moon is a Sun Returning as a Ghost, curated by Lara Khaldi in Jerusalem.
