‘Nebula,’ presented by Fondazione In Between Art Film during the 60th Venice Biennale
BY ANNA MAYDANIK
Basir Mahmood, Brown Bodies in an Open Landscape are Often Migrating, 2024 in “Nebula”, Fondazione In Between Art Film at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, 2024.Courtesy of the artist, and Fondazione In Between Art Film.
The Fondazione In Between Art Film at the 60th Venice Biennale presents Nebula, the Latin word for fog, a show of eight newly commissioned video installations in the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, that for four centuries nursed impoverished Venetians with shelter.
Basel Abbas (1983, Cyprus) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (1983, USA) present Until we became fire and fire us (2023–ongoing). Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film for the exhibition Nebula 2024. Co-produced by Sharjah Art Foundation and co-commissioned by Polygreen Culture and Art Initiative (PCAI) for the Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023).
Spread across a 7-channel video, a 6-channel sound piece, sublimation prints on fabric, digital prints on metal, and 7 steel panels, Until we became fire and fire us (2023–ongoing) translates Palestine’s ‘absent presences’ through the viewer’s own senses. Sound and moving images stir the heart with subjective histories on a vanishing territory. Yet the place remains, and fills with ‘forbidden love.’
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Until we became fire and fire us, 2023–on going in “Nebula”, Fondazione In Between Art Film at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, 2024. Courtesy of the artists, and Fondazione In Between Art Film
Installation views by Lorenzo Palmieri
Abbas and Abou-Rahme, write, ‘Palestine, the loss of our land haunts us. Having been severed from the land we are haunted by it. A forbidden land like a forbidden love. Until we became fire and fire us explore various forms of hauntings, love stories bound to loss, land and self, forms of imprisonment and the call to get free, with sound and song being at the heart of this exploration. In it all is a search for a reconnection to a severed broken land, community, history, one that haunts, imprisons and moves us all at once. The project is a mixed media installation with multiple channel sound and video. It formally explores the idea of hauntings in its aural and visual content and the way in which this material appears and disappears into a given space. Sometimes appearing as poetry from a dissonant voice, a broken melody or intense flashes of text and video, or an imprint from a forbidden land, a forbidden love.’
Basir Mahmoud (b.1985, Pakistan) presents Brown Bodies in an Open Landscape are Often Migrating (2024). Originally from Lahore, Mahmoud invited a crew from Lollywood to recreate the confusion of migration. Sweating under the sun, and communicating directions with pointed fingers and circled maps, the director, crew members and cameramen prepare to shoot in the desert. Listening to the soundscape made in a recording studio, visitors stand between Mahmoud’s triptych of moving images and the altarpieces of the church of Santa Maria dei Derelitti. Mahmoud’s emphasis on the process of moviemaking with a soundscape that resembles the undocumented migrants’ journey to an unknown reality moves neither forward nor backward. Brown Bodies in an Open Landscape are Often Migrating hangs an existential halo around Nebula.
Nebula inspires a corporeal remembrance; a quiet history that lives only in one’s connection to the land; to the experience within the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, that will house this show until the 60th Venice Biennale concludes on 24 November 2024. After that, Nebula fades, as does the subject inspiring Mahmoud and Abbas and Abou-Rahme.
Anna Maydanik is a writer and gallerist who provides creative consultation to filmmakers, artists and writers to develop projects. She is based in Kyiv, where she has a gallery, Анна showing contemporary photojournalism and the Ukrainian avant-garde. She is currently in pre-production as a writer and producer on several film projects, both fiction and documentary. She is the editor and writer for an upcoming photo project, titled “Concierges of Kyiv.”