ONLINE STREAM:
Basma Alsharif
Ouroboros

 

7 April–31 May 20

 

Due to circumstances revolving around the COVID-19 virus, the film screening had to be canceled. Instead, we will show Basma Alsharif’s Ouroboros (2017) online.

 

Film introduction by Basma Alsharif: 00:00–02:20 minutes
Film: 02:21–01:16:30 minutes
In English

 

 

Ouroboros is visual artist Basma Alsharif’s (born in 1983, KW) first feature-length film. It is an homage to the Gaza Strip (and the artist’s native Palestine) and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. The film is a multilingual journey through time and space shot in numerous places: Gaza, Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert in California, Italy, and Brittany. The experimental plot follows a main character through five different landscapes, upending mass-mediated representation of trauma and marking the end as the beginning, exploring the subject of the eternal return and how we move forward when all is lost. Referring to the image of a snake consuming its own tail, the title of the work speaks both to regeneration and destruction, and reflects notions of progress and violent upheaval as embedded in the idea of change. As a main character searches for a past lover—while possibly leaving and reuniting with them—the work suggests a need to forgo one’s past in order to move forward through heartbreak and loss. Characters and their intentions remain unclear, and any notion of the real is contested as fact and fiction collapse. Ouroboros contemplates the complexities of attempting to speak about a return to a place one cannot access or that doesn’t exist anymore.

 

Basma Alsharif will briefly introduce her work prior to the screening.