ODORLESS BLUE FLOWERS AWAKE PREMATURELY

For many inhabitants of this world, the dystopia is not a future possibility but rather a historical reality. Odorless Blue Flowers Awake Prematurely is dystopian nonfiction, a science-fiction documentary, which explores Beirut’s peripheral rustbelt that sits on the banks of the city’s river and is affected by the blast on August 4, 2020.


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2021

HD Video / 6’ / Color

THIS HAUNTING MEMORY THAT IS NOT MY OWN

Through semi-fictional storytelling, This Haunting Memory That Is Not My Own shines a light on how economic growth and environmental decay are interlinked and entrenched in social and ecological injustice. The film addresses forms of extraction and violence inflicted on human and nonhuman bodies and the ecosystem along the shorelines of Beirut, the city’s port, and around the Karantina district, a dumping ground for the unwanted - things and bodies alike.

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2021

HD Video / 30’21” / Color

BILLY PILGRIM HAS COME UNSTUCK IN TIME

Billy Pilgrim Has Come Unstuck In Time captures through the security footage of the Beirut Art Center that had commissioned the work the temporal disjunction that occurred during the city-razing explosion at the Beirut port. The disjunction created a time-labyrinth where the center’s security guard finds himself stuck, all the while having become unstuck in time.

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2020

HD Video / 4’25” / B&W

YABANDJO

Yabandjo is a documentary-essay investigating the remnants of a traumatic past in bodies consumed by history as an uncertain future looms over the landscapes they inhabit. Landscapes that are in the process of being transformed into what will no longer be recognized by the present, where the camera intervenes to document that which will soon be no more. The landscapes of Anjar, a small town in rural Lebanon only a few miles from the Syrian border and inhabited by ethnic Armenians where the ordinary and the uncanny meet in a border community in transition haunted by a dark past and an unknown future.

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2016

HD Video / 28’18” / Color

QUITE THE AFTERNOON

ambient divination invites an acute awareness of the inherent nexience of all. Summoned out of deep time as the ability to hear trees talk and grasp sunken waves, it expands history beyond the convex surface of the ecosphere as snow crystals erupt in mid-summer.

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post-production

HD Video / 15’15” / Color and B&W

ASSEMBLAGES

Assemblages is a video installation that assembles a cluster of imagery, sound, and memory from a dying city where the landscape sits over layers of catastrophic episodes from the near and distant pasts. ‘The time is out of joint’ here, collapsing distances, splitting images, and turning the soundscape into fragmented echoes.

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2021

HD Video / 21’39” / Color and B&W

I, HERE, NOW

I, Here, Now is a hybrid work that brings a filmmaker, several writers, actors, and composers from or adjacent to the Armenian diaspora of Beirut together. It is composed of different chapters contemplating time, place, longing, and belonging.

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2021

HD Video / 7’3” / Color and B&W

CÂMARA

Just before the end of the second decade of the new Millenium, a pandemic hits the world, forcing people to retreat into isolation and trade their physical bodies with their online counterparts. She now spends her days wandering through her apartment like a fish in a bowl. He spends his time glued to canvases that have long abandoned meatspace for cyberspace. She moves in place. He is sedentary - at least physically. The passage of time is off-beat and the bodies retroactively reshape themselves with Instagram filters.

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2021

HD Video / 30’19” / Color and B&W

NOT, NOT ARAB. IN THE PRESENCE OF THE CORPSE. NOT, NOT ARAB.

Not, not Arab. In the Presence of the Corpse. Not, not Arab., gives us a single channel projection of a split-screen, wherein the reader-performer is simultaneously captured at different angles and scales, moving at a quasi-unnoticeable speed via digital zoom in and out. Cinematic split screens denote two different actions, by two different players, happening simultaneously. Here, the split-screen provides a parallax view of one action by one player; a redoubling that defies the ontological binary is/not, and, by extension, then/now and where artist-writer Walid Sadek reads an essay from his book, The Ruin To Come (2016), bracketing the recitation by reading his short essay, Not, not Arab, twice.

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2021

HD Video / 45’ / Color

NEOLOGICON VOL. I

The future collapses into the present and encounters a bulk of information containing a plethora of neologisms, descriptions, sketches, diagrams, and visions of microorganisms, climate phenomena, and forms of ecological collapse currently untraceable to any past or present occurrences or archives. Neologicon is an archaeological dig of memory from the future, initiated through the deciphering of scrambled bits of data, where the process of word-making doesn’t just mimic what it tries to describe but collapses into it.

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2018

HD Video / 3’39” / Color