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Event details

The 2024 Matar Family presents Gaza on Screen in Times of Genocide, a lecture and screening with Nadia Yaqub

Co-sponsored by Mizna, the Department of Asian and Middle East Studies, the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative LIterature, the Department of English

October 18, 2024
Talk at 4:00 PM at 412 Pillsbury Hall, 310 Pillsbury Dr. SE Minneapolis, MN 55455
Reception at 5:30 PM at 10 Church St SE Minneapolis, MN 55455
Screening at 7:00 PM at 10 Church St, Room 100

ABOUT THE LECTURE 

It has been said repeatedly that we are for the first time witnessing a genocide unfolding in real time. How are we to treat the images genocide that have flooded the screens since October 7? Nadia Yaqub addresses this question by discussing the circulation of these images in the wake of a long history of variously documented Palestinian disasters and Palestinian creative responses to those disasters. She frames her comments around two axes: the potential danger and efficacy of the humanitarian image and the ongoing practice of Palestinians striving to share agential images of their lives even under conditions of extreme violence and consider what might the absence of such images mean for Palestinians and their allies around the world.

Nadia Yaqub’s research has treated Arab cultural texts ranging from medieval literature and contemporary oral poetry to modern prose fiction and visual culture. Her recent publications include Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press 2017), a volume of essays co-edited with Rula Quawas;  Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2018), a monograph about Palestinian cinema of the long 1970s; and Gaza on Screen (Duke University Press, 2023), an edited volume about film and media from and about the Gaza Strip.

ABOUT THE SCREENING

In addition to a lecture with Nadia Yaqub, the Matar Family presents a screening of Vibrations from Gaza by Rehab Nazzal and Offing by Oraib Toukan

Vibrations from Gaza by Rehab Nazzal (2023)
Vibrations from Gaza offers a glimpse into the experiences of Deaf children in the colonized and confined coastal territory of Gaza, Palestine.  Born and raised under Israeli siege and frequent onslaughts, Amani, Musa, Israa, and other Deaf Children, provide vivid accounts of their encounter of bombardment and the constant presence of drones in their sky.

Rehab Nazzal is a Palestinian-born multidisciplinary artist based in Canada and Palestine. Her video, photography and sound works deal with violence of settler colonialism. Nazzal’s work has been shown in Canada, Palestine, and internationally in both group and solo exhibitions, including Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, CONTACT Photography Festival, Toronto Images Festival, A Space Gallery, Toronto; Karsh-Masson Art Gallery, Ottawa; AXNEO 7, Quebec; McIntosh Art Gallery, London; Toronto-Palestine Film Festival; United Art Society, Alberta; Khalil Sakakini Center, Ramallah; Art Gallery of Mississauga; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Spanish Institute of Art, and the International Durzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany.

Offing by Oraib Toukan (2021)
Offing was produced in the aftermath of the 2021 Israeli war on Palestinians residing in the Israeli-besieged Gaza strip. It engages stories told by Gaza artist Salman Nawati, against footage shot by Toukan that explores the tender and the mundane as acts of life. But also, on the inadequacy of representing suffering. Ultimately— what narratives escape the frame of war?

Oraib Toukan is an artist, writer and educator.  She is a EUME fellow at the Transregional Forum, Berlin and was a Clarendon scholar at the University of Oxford, Ruskin School of Art where she completed her PhD in 2019. Until 2015 she was head of the Arts Division and Media Studies Program at Bard College at Al Quds University, Palestine.