First look at Videoart Festival Archives #1 DISAPPEAR

FIRST EMERGING TOPICS

#DISAPPEAR

"An act of someone or something ceasing to be visible." This term is connected to gender topics and postcolonial studies in the frame of deleting identity and exile from territories.

This is the first approach at Videoart Festival Archives and about emerging topics. The theoretical research is vast, and these are suggestions as a starting point to underline the disappearance topic in the research of many artists of the MENA areas. Points of view are various in the frame of performative and videoart languages. Disappearing is a state of mind or a physical need.

#INVISIBLE/DELETED BODIES

MIRNA BAMIEH (Palestine)- Tutorial: How to disappear, become an image (Still frame)

A youtube instructional tutorial on "how to disappear and become an image" prepared by artist Mirna Bamieh, in which the artist shows how to disappear into images; in this video, she disappears into images that reduce people, catastrophes and events into mass-distributed iconic images.

PARYA VATANKHAH (Iran) - Women must be beautiful, Women must be hidden 2017 (Still frame)

I wear and remove a headscarf over and over again alternately for the duration of the performance. It starts with calm movements, then the rhythm accelerates gradually. This gesture is repeated so often that it becomes violent and overwhelming.

This repetitive gesture represents a mixture of memory, sadness and suffering I have experienced since I was 7.

The first part of the sound is the voice of the female demonstrations in Iran against the Hijab demanding equality between women and men, what they had before the Iranian revolution which had transformed the country into an Islamic regime, on 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 of March 1979.

The second part of the sound at the end of the video is the voice of women screaming because they were arrested on the streets and handcuffed by Islamic Police for not wearing a complete Hijab in 2016, more than 38 years after the Iranian Revolution.

ADAMA DELPHINE FAWUNDU  (Africa) Through my daughter's eyes 3:22 2021 (still frame)

Adama Delphine Fawundu is photographer and visual artist born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa.

“Adama Delphine Fawundu’s work is about finding ways to connect with her kin – a group not merely confined to those who share a direct common ancestor but an expansive definition inclusive of the many who descend from the dispersed, the stolen, those for whom the violence, and opportunity wrought by the sea is at once a spectre and a fact of everyday life,”  writes scholar Niama Safia Sandy.