My films and installations often question the conflicted interrelationship between individual rights and state duties, while stressing socio-political gaps between the personal and the collective. In my practice, I like reconstructing documentary narratives into fiction, decompressing their poetic, almost fairytale-like qualities to reexamine their representational value and meaning today. My ongoing DAS KINO PROJEKT (The Cinema Project, 2009–2022), an in situ traveling cinema theater, deals with local archives and issues of cultural memory. The KINO started in Beirut and could be considered research, installation, archive, and gallery, or none of all these terms and simply as homage to vanishing cinema culture worldwide. My recent film installation LATENT BORDER(S) is a metaphor for present psychological and economic manifestations as they relate to issues of border segregation and political migration. LATENT BORDER(S) examines historical overlaps between Berlin and Beirut, cities that share divisions of East and West. Shot in 2019, the installation tackles the so-called issues of illegal migration and the micro-economies that borders have long generated. My film IN THE RUINS OF BAALBECK STUDIOS (2017) is 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 Egyptian cinema. My video installation E.D.L (2011–2022) transports us on a journey behind the modernist façade 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 power cuts of up to twenty hours per day, thus this building remains a highly politicized subject.
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