Resounding Landscapes
Featuring: Nour Abed, Sirine Fattouh, Hussein Nassereddine and Basma al-Sharif
Curated by: Nour Helou
Screening Online: Septemper 12 -21, 2025
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Resounding Landscapes brings together short films by Arab filmmakers who center songs in their cinematic offerings. In our songs were ready for all wars to come, Noor Abed investigates the critical and representational potential of Palestinian historical communal folktales and songs to rewrite reality as we know it; in A Song to My Brothers, Sirine Fattouh stages six women to subvert Lebanon’s national anthem—striking back at patriarchal and nationalist authority; in Hussein Nassereddine‘s A King Made of Nothing, voices and images are collected across generations to reflect on mortality and poetic memory of Arab singers; and in Capital, Basma al-Sharif critiques the rise of architectural neo-colonial violence in Egypt via a re and mis – translation of a French song.
Film Program:
our songs were ready for all wars to come, Noor Abed, Palestine, 2021, 20 mins.
Arabic no subtitles
Narrated through a song composed of lyrics woven from various folk tales and performed by Palestinian singer Maya Khaldi, the film traces situated movements and collective rituals tied to notions of mourning and death. Captured through analog film and sound, the film creates a space that evokes the capacity of social formation and the possibility of recalling a memory that is capable of decentralizing images of fixity; a memory that is liberated from monuments.
A Song to My Brothers, Sirine Fattouh, France, 2023, 2 mins.
No Dialogue
Song to My Brothers is a video performance in which six women hum the Lebanese national anthem while beating out its rhythm with leather belts. Holding the belts taut between their hands, they snap them rhythmically, a gesture that evokes both discipline and latent violence. This loaded choreography disrupts the solemnity of the anthem, transforming it into a space of tension. By confronting a national symbol with gestures associated with control and coercion, Fattouh exposes the authoritarian undercurrents embedded in both patriotic and domestic spheres.
A King Made of Nothing, Hussein Nassereddine, Lebanon, 2023, 7 mins.
Arabic with English subtitles
A King Made of Nothing by Hussein Nassereddine explores the human voice, time, and aging, as singers transform from mythical figures into human bodies. Through found footage, personal poems, digital images, and videos shot by his mother in their southern Lebanese village, Nassereddine captures fleeting moments where voices seem to escape time—only to return, marked by mortality. The work becomes an intimate reflection on memory, geography, and the fragile persistence of song.
Capital, Basma Al Sharif, Egypt, 2023, 17 mins.
Arabic, Italian, French with English subtitles
A Ventriloquist walks into a bar and orders a stiff drink.
The Bartender asks: will that be all?
The Dummy answers: Does it look like I can speak with this hand up my ass?
As Egypt syncs further into poverty and is overwhelmed by debt, new cities are being erected across the country and prisons fill with dissenting opinions. But who are these cities for and what desire or ambivalence do they inspire — and at what cost. Since it is currently not possible to safely speak about this: a ventriloquist, songs, and advertisements describe a seemingly bygone era of fascism. Referencing Telefoni Bianchi films, a precursor to propaganda cinema under Mussolini, the legacy of building new capitals provides the material to express opinions and hope, through satire.
Biographies:
Noor Abed is a Palestinian artist who works at the intersection of performance and film, combining forms of the ‘staged’ and the ‘documentary’. Her practice examines notions of social choreographies and collective formations, searching through the connection between the notion of ‘synchrony’ and social action. Abed attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in Νew York in 2015-16, and the Home Workspace Program (HWP) at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut 2016-17. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed was an assistant curator in documenta fifteen, Kassel 2021-22, an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24. She was awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation/ Museu Tàpies Film Production Grant in 2022, and her film ‘A Night We Held Between’ was selected as a first-prize winner of the e-flux Film Award 2024. Her book ‘Stars at Midday’ was published by Occasional Papers in October 2024.
Sirine Fattouh (b. 1980) is a visual artist, researcher, and educator with a PhD in Fine Arts from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a degree from ENSAPC. Born in Beirut, her practice explores themes of exile, memory, and silenced narratives through video installations, drawings, performances, and oral histories. Her work centers on fragmented memory, non-heroic lives, and alternative histories shaped by war, displacement, and conflict, often through a feminist and decolonial lens. She engages with intimate and suppressed stories, using art as a space for preserving and reactivating marginalized voices. Humor subtly intervenes to challenge dominant representations and the figure of the “perfect Arab artist.” Since 2005, she has taught in France and Lebanon and worked at the Centre Pompidou in 2010 on the “Art and Globalization” program. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at MAXXI (Rome), Centre Pompidou (Metz), Mucem (Marseille), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Beirut Art Center, Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), and the Thessaloniki Biennale.
Hussein Nassereddine is a multidisciplinary artist living and working between Beirut (Lebanon), and Paris (France). His work in installation, writing, video and performance originates from a practice around language that builds fragile monuments – some verbal, some sonic, some tactile – rooted in collective histories and resources of poetry, ruins, construction and image-making. His works, performances and texts have been presented in museums, biennales and institutions around the world, including the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2024), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2023), Jameel Art Center (2022), MISC Athens (2021), and Beirut Art Center (2020) among others. His first book How to see the palace pillars as palm trees was published in Arabic in 2020 with Kayfa ta. The English translation was published in 2024.
Basma Al Sharif is a Palestinian artist/filmmaker exploring cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works. She received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007, was a resident of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in 2009, the Pavillon Neuflize OBC at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014-15. She received a Jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial in 2009, was awarded a Visual Arts of the Fundación Botín in 2010, Mophradat’s Consortium Commissions in 2018, she was a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme for 2022-2023 and was nominated for the Prix Aware for 2024. Al-Sharif’s Major exhibitions include: Pompidou Metz, De Appel, the Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series for the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, Modern Mondays at MOMA, CCA Glasgow, SALT Galata, the Whitney Biennial, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, Berlin Documentary Forum, and Manifesta 8. Her films have screened in the international film festivals of Locarno, Berlin, Mar del Plata, Milan, London, Toronto, New York, Montreal, and Yamagata amongst others. Basma is based in Berlin and represented by Galerie Imane Farés in Paris.
