Sada (regroup) screening + artist talk
North View Gallery
From 2011-2015, Sada, an online and in person ad hoc art school, was set up in Baghdad to support artists working through the aftermath of US-led invasion and occupation. Nearly a decade later, former artists of Sada came together again, reflecting on their creative and disparate lives since that time. Artists Sajjad Abbas, Bassim Al Shaker, Ali Eyal, Sarah Munaf, and Rijin Sahakian each created video works, comprising one experimental, interconnected anthology film on individual and collective art practice in a protracted era of international warfare.
The North View Gallery, with support from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, will be hosting a screening of Sada (regroup) commissioned by documenta fifteen on Thursday, November 14 from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m in the MAHB Auditorium in the Cascade campus. Sada artists Ali Eyal and Bassim Al Shaker will be in attendance and will speak about their work after the screening.
Sada (regroup)
Sajjad Abbas, Ali Eyal, Sarah Munaf, Rijin Sahakian, Bassim Al Shaker
2022, 54 minutes
In Arabic with English subtitles, and English with Arabic subtitles
Commissioned by documenta fifteen
Using street footage, narrative, and documentary, Sajjad Abbas’s Water of Life tracks its filmmakers’ urge to forge protest that is bigger than himself, following monumental artwork, migration, and the return to place and protest. In Ali Eyal’s The Blue Ink Pocket, a mysterious letter from an artist is authored to communicate the futility of describing violence in full, its scattering of meaning, and the power it derives through its lesser understood perpetrators and permutations. In Journey Inside a City, shot in Iraq, Turkey, and Ukraine, Sarah Munaf layers her experience as a sculptor and as part of a threatened community of artists and residents in Baghdad, and, later, as a refugee finding her way in coastal Turkey as her parents navigate life in Ukraine. In Barbershop, stop-motion animation, cut out drawings, and first-person storytelling give shape to the artist Bassim Al Shaker’s memory of his own kidnapping and its impact on his personal and creative life in the years that followed. Taking moments from popular and political culture during the 1991 Iraq war and the second invasion of Iraq, Rijin Sahakian’s Anthem traces the use of multinational warfare in its varying methodologies— from technology to the arts—to extinguish life.
The Sada (regroup) screening is part of the Refractions screening series from the North View Gallery, made possible through a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Refractions features artists who use video, animation, and performance to refract or bend narrative directions by exposing the complicated realities of cultural myths, colonization, protracted international wars, migration, and the implications of past violence on potential futures.
About the Artists
Ali Eyal (b.1994) is an artist working with painting, drawing, and video to explore the relationships between personal history, transitory memories, politics, and identity. Eyal is currently featured in Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present (2023). Eyal’s solo exhibitions include In the Head’s Sunrise, Brief Histories, New York (2023); In the Head’s Dusk, SAW Gallery, Ottawa (2023). Recent group exhibitions include, Is It Morning for You Yet?, the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2023); Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine, Chicago Cultural Center (2023); Documenta 15, Kassel (2022); Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011, MoMA PS1, New York (2020); How to Reappear: Through the quivering leaves of independent publishing, Beirut Art Center, Lebanon (2019). Eyal’s video work is included in the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil: Memory is an Edition Station, São Paulo (forthcoming October 2023); Rencontres Internationales, Paris; VITRINE x Kino Screenings, London; Sharjah Film Platform, Sharjah Art Foundation; and Cairo Video Festival, Medrar, Cairo. His works are in the collection of Kadist, Paris; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. Eyal earned an undergraduate degree from the Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad (2015), he currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Bassim Al Shaker (b. 1986 Baghdad, Iraq) is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker. Al Shaker received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BFA from the University of Baghdad College of Fine Arts. Al Shaker has exhibited work in Documenta Fifteen (Kassel, Germany); The Venice Biennale for the Iraqi Pavilion; The Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe, AZ); FLXST Contemporary (Chicago, IL); and MANA Contemporary (Chicago, IL), among other venues. His work has been written about in publications such as The New York Times, ArtNews, Artnet, e-flux, NewCity, WBEZ Chicago, and Phoenix New Times.
Graphic design by Matt Foster.