May 18. Screening and Encounter with Siska. In the Ruins of Baalbeck Studios & E.D.L

Saturday, May 18, 19:00
In the Ruins of Baalbeck Studios & E.D.L
Screening and Encounter with Siska

In this encounter Siska will be presenting and discussing two works, his latest film In the Ruins of Baalbeck Studios (Arabic title: Bayna Hayakel Studio Baalbeck) about the ruination of film heritage in Lebanon navigated through the country’s cinematic heydays of the late 60s and early 70s — a period that witnessed a rise of Egyptian producers and directors moving to Lebanon to make films partly due to Nasser’s nationalization of the Egyptian cinema. The story of this film project evolves around one of the biggest production studios in the Arab world, and its lost archive. Negligence by the Lebanese authorities has led to mold growing on parts of this archive inside the damp underground warehouses.
Siska’s video installation E.D.L transports us on a journey behind the modernist facade of Beirut’s electricity building. The video portrays Lebanon’s National Electricity building as an homage to a once modernist project linked to the very construction of Lebanon’s modern state. But till today Beirut suffers from a power cut up to 8 hours per day, thus this building remains a highly politicized subject.

Siska, Beirut-born (1984), lives and works between Beirut and Berlin. He holds an M.F.A. in Film-making from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA). Siska’s multidisciplinary work often questions the ruination of Arab cultural heritage and the conflicted interrelationship between individual rights and state duties, while stressing on sociopolitical gaps between the personal and the collective. His work was recently been shown in Centre 104 Paris, Mosaic rooms London, Beirut Art Center, Humboldt Forum Berlin and his latest film was premiered in the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded.

Photos by Benjamin Busch