Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts

BEK invites you to Kulturnatt in our project space, with screenings of the films “The White Elephant” by Shuruq Harb and “Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 1” by Marwa Arsanios, both artists affiliated with BEK.

Friday
September 12. 18:00 – 22:00
BEK, C. Sundts gate 55, floor 9.
Works will be screened in a loop from 18:15 to 22:00.
Free entry and open for all.

Shuruq Harb: The White Elephant (Palestine, 2018) 

Duration: 12 min
Language: English

Using images shared on the Internet by Israelis during the Gulf War, the First Intifada and trance music gatherings, Shuruq Harb composes a portrait of a Palestinian teenager in the 1990s, in the mirror of Israeli pop culture. “The White Elephant” is shaped as a letter to a lost friend, where fragmented identities, political violence, and moments of euphoria intersect with worries about romance and belonging. The footage, reframed through the teenager’s voice, reconstructs an adolescence marked by the atmosphere of the Oslo Accords and the distortions of living under occupation.

Part experimental diary and part confessional testimony, the video narrates through lies, humor, intimacy, and acts of transgression that project a confrontational gaze onto the political landscape. Hypnotic sequences of dreams, freefall, and trance, as a state and as a music genre, interrupt documentary conventions like the linearity of beginning, middle, and end. Instead, history appears as fragments, taken apart and reassembled without certainty of how they were meant to fit together.

Harb’s practice emphasizes the sensation of living through history rather than explaining it. In “The White Elephant”, narration resists closure, insisting on the affective registers of growing up in Palestine under occupation. Through this unsettled haze, the film holds space for memory, desire, and imagination to coexist, challenging the conventions of representation.

Shuruq Harb

Shuruq Harb is a Palestine-based artist, filmmaker, writer, and editor. In her works she focuses on online visual culture, and traces subversive routes for the circulation of images and goods. She received the award for best short film at Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris for her short film “The White Elephant” (2018). Harb won the 2019 Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Grant, which provides an international platform for emerging video artists.

Marwa Arsanios: Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 1 (2017)

Duration: 22 min
Language: English, with English subtitles.

The film series “Who is Afraid of Ideology?” Describes women who join forces to anti colonial battles against capitalist exploitation. In places like Northern Syria and Colombia, women claim the right to land and to reconnect to nature, where self-defense, autonomy, collectivity, indigenous struggle, land rights and seed protection define the common ground of women who are resisting extractivist industries.

Part 1 that is shown at BEK as part of Kulturnatt, was filmed in 2017 and focuses on the Kurdish autonomous women’s movement and their structures for autonomy and knowledge production. This Gerilla-led movement views gender liberation as a co-existing and equal struggle to that of resolving the conflicts of war, feudalism, religious tensions and economic struggle. 

Testimonies, analyses, and critical reflections from inside the movement or from individuals close to it, is edited together in a single, solid entity. Arsanios works with conscious strategies of non-diegetic sound, that is where audio does not run in synchronicity with the image. This is an interruption that defies classic documentary’s rigid convention to voice and image. In other words Arsanios breaks the conventions of documentary portraiture, and focuses rather on the complex differences, where to be heard does not necessarily means to be understood.

Marwa Arsanios

Marwa Arsanios is an artist, filmmaker and researcher whose work can take the form of installation, performance and moving image. She reconsiders the political development of the second half of the twentieth century from a contemporary perspective, focusing on gender relations, collectivism, urbanism and industrialization. Her research work includes many disciplines and is deployed in numerous collaborative projects.

Several solo exhibitions have been dedicated to her work, most recent: Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany (2023); Mosaïc Rooms, London (2022) and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021), as well as Documenta 15, Kassel (2022) and 11th Berlin Biennale (2020).

Accessibility

BEK’s space unfortunately is not wheelchair accessible. Please send us an email at bek@bek.no if you’re using a wheelchair, and we’ll do our best to facilitate your needs. Our space has all gender toilet facilities. Service dogs are welcome. We also provide the option of a quiet room.

Image: 1) Still from The White Elephant, Shuruq Harb, 2018