“Outside the Gates” by Naeem Mohaiemen
110’ · In competition
While a crisis generated by disciplining dominated headlines, Columbia University School of Arts students continued to make their work in quiet and persistent timbres. Films by Krista Gay, Rama Ghanem, Sharon Lee, Sasha Fishman, Erica Enriquez, Elisheva Gavra, Fadl Fakhouri, and Benjamin Salesse are compiled here by their faculty Naeem Mohaiemen and curated by Adam Szymczyk.
Adam Szymczyk and Naeem Mohaiemen have collaborated multiple times over the last decade, mapping a shifting production situation. Their first dialogue resulted in the solo show and book Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (2014) at Kunsthalle Basel, followed by the photography series Volume Eleven (Flaw in the Algorithm of Cosmopolitanism) (2016) in South as a State of Mind (Documenta 14 Issue # 1), the video Century’s Container (2016) for Parliament of Bodies, the lecture performance Red Star, Crescent Moon (2016), and finally the films Tripoli Cancelled (2017) at Documenta 14, Athens, and Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) at Documenta 14, Kassel. For the St. Moritz Art Film Festival, Mohaiemen selected films made by his current and former students at the School of Arts, Columbia University. While a crisis generated by disciplining dominated headlines, students continued to make their work in quiet and persistent timbres, a generational synthesis of sorrow and hope.
- Naeem Mohaiemen, Wooster Street, 22’, 2022
- Krista Nadal Gay [MFA ‘24], Winner Winner, 5’, 2023
- Rama Ghanem [MFA ‘19] ‘25], I’ll Send You Pictures, 15’, 2024
- Sharon Lee [MFA ‘25], A Palm, A Fountain, An Umbrella, 10’, 2024
- Sasha Fishman [MFA ‘24], I Want To Be Wet, 5’, 2024
- Erica Enriquez [MFA ‘24], Entrance of the Gladiators, 9’24”, 2023
- Elisheva Gavra [MFA ‘23], The Return, 8’, 2022
- Fadl Fakhouri [MFA ‘22], Freedom of Movement, 23’, 2024
- Benjamin Salesse [MFA ‘24], And yet, here you are, 10’, 2024
- Naeem Mohaiemen, Forever 1964, 3’, 2024
FILM SYNOPSIS
Naeem Mohaiemen, Wooster Street, 22’, 2022
Wooster Street is an afternoon conversation between Naeem and Judy Blum, at her home–the Fluxus Building, known as the birthplace of Soho’s artist community (and now a lonely remnant of that time). Featuring the voice of Judy Blum Reddy; Bruno Blum, Home Movies (1945-1970); Jonas Mekas, I Leave Chelsea Hotel (1967); Jonas Mekas, Zefiro Torna, or Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas (1992). Roslyn Bernstein and Shael Shapiro’s Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street and the Evolution of SoHo (2010) discusses the sprawling history of how Lithuanian artist George Maciunas created Soho’s first artist co-ops on the upper floors of four buildings he purchased on Wooster Street in the 1960s and 70s. Judy is one of the last original residents of the artist-run coops. Interviewed during lockdown 2020, she said: “Many of my friends died last year.
Krista Nadal Gay, Winner Winner, 5’, 2023
“Winner Winner” is a video collage featuring clips of Black actresses accepting Academy Awards, from Hattie McDaniel’s historic win for Best Supporting Actress in “Gone With The Wind” in 1939 to Sheril Lee Ralph’s win for Best Supporting Comedy Actress in 2022. At first, the viewer is allowed access to hearing the names of each winner, until all are announced. As their individual speeches commence, a choir of voices sings over each other, making the dialogue illegible, except for select moments, capturing the complex intersection of recognition and marginalization experienced by Black actresses throughout history.
Rama Ghanem, I’ll Send You Pictures, 15’, 2024
The film documents the first-time exchange between the artist and her family member, a second cousin currently domiciled in a small West Bank village under increasingly tight military occupation. In between the dialogue, a signal traveled thousands of miles between New York and the West Bank, is a visual exchange of images, both archival and immediate. Having rediscovered and amassed information about an archaeological site under the family estate, the artist’s cousin shares anecdotal information, and personal family narratives enmeshed with the witness account of an American excavation of their family’s land. The artist, having never set foot in her hometown, appeals to her cousin for an interview.
Sharon Lee, A Palm, A Fountain, An Umbrella, 10’, 2024
Searching for creases of home in a foreign fabric, I started with photo residue of Hong Kong that circulated around the globe—postcards from the British Colonial period. The video poem revolves around the “Canton Girl,” a figure I encountered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art archive. In different postcards of the Public Garden, there is a repeated shadow of this figure, a girl looking elsewhere and sometimes holding an umbrella. Bridging a narrative between a museum portrait and ebay postcards, the video-poem explores the circulating and shifting signs layered in fractures of social-political shifts, bilingual cultural identity, coastal periphery.
Sasha Fishman, I Want To Be Wet, 5’, 2024
Five fish once changed me. They lived within four walls of darkened glass for six months where we saw each other every other day. I felt comfort from them; I will never know what they felt of me. I wanted to be in their water with them. When the fish departed, I did my best to keep their bodies warm, slathering skin in egg yolk and pulling them apart to find an answer for their disappearance. Through our time together, they brought me to a failed salmon ladder, to fate in plastic buckets, and babies in aluminum tanks. I like to think Noah wanted us to choose which fish got to mate.
Erica Enriquez, Entrance of the Gladiators, 9’24”, 2023
The word peel suggests a removal – an intermediary, protective sheet, or covering that is able to contain or reveal what lies beneath. A layer, skin, or mask, to be discarded, though essential to the processes of both growth and repair. I use performance to combine familial mythologies with the complicated cultural and geo-political material histories of my sculptures, in order to speak to the multiplicity and hybridity of being a mixed race, queer person in America.
Elisheva Gavra, The Return, 7’15”, 2024
In the summer of 2022, on a visit to her great grandfather’s grave in Israel/Palestine, the artist discovers that the site has been transformed into a pilgrimage destination, and the identity of her ancestor has been designated as a Jewish saint of sorts. In this short presentation, which pairs documentary-style photographs and audio narration, she begins an investigation of the actualities of saint veneration; from contending with historical context to the discontents of communication in the family.
Fadl Fakhouri, Freedom of Movement, 23’, 2024
A poetry film that draws links between many elements, including California’s underground rave scene and haflat shabab (Palestinian bachelor parties). Text elements and firsthand footage enhance the immersive experience and serve as a narrative tool to elucidate the challenges and constraints of movement within a choreopoliced society. The film aims to showcase the queer, othered experience without objectification, rejecting the colonial origins of photography as a means of surveillance–employing abstract imagery, video collaging and representation of drug usage via colored sound waves and lumetri scopes.
Benjamin Salesse, And yet, here you are, 10’, 2024
“ ‘Revolutionaries die young and should not have children,’ she recalls him saying. ‘And yet, here you are.’ When I ask Father about it, he concurs: ‘I didn’t imagine I would live to be 30.’ But between the time of their separation and the birth of my sister, the communist movement collapsed. And having children was his first step in a world now voided of utopia.” Close-ups of photographic surfaces and newspaper clippings are furtively intercut. By battling against the lack of figurative images, this work participates in the artist’s recurring interest in the shortcomings of the photograph, an object that attempts to salvage, to revive, to preserve something on the verge of disappearance but itself frail, mortal, and destined to disappear.
Naeem Mohaiemen, Forever 1964, 3’, 2024
Recently found and lovingly restored, this newsreel report on the 1964 World’s Fair demonstrates that the debate over hummus has a longer provenance than the arrival of Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods to the American landscape. Though the copyright question remains tied up in World Trade Organization legislation, gourmet chefs can take comfort in knowing they circumnavigate older histories and are free of the obsession for novelty.
FILMMAKER BIOS
Naeem Mohaiemen is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University, New York. He uses film, photography, and essays to explore utopia-dystopia slippage in the Islamicate world after 1945.
Krista Gay (Columbia MFA ‘24) is a Los Angeles-born, New York-based artist working through photography, video, text, and sound installation. Thinking about the images of Blackness circulated throughout the internet, television, and other forms of media.
Rama Ghanem (Columbia MFA ‘25) is a practicing conceptual artist and a Columbia University MFA student. She is expanding her research through a fellowship from the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life.
Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee (Columbia MFA ‘25) is an interdisciplinary visual artist who approaches images in a sculptural and relational manner. She works with time-based materials to address the loss and disappearance of memory and history.
Sasha Fishman (Columbia MFA ‘24) is a sculptor and researcher who works with materials such as hagfish slime, algae, and cicada shells. Sasha’s work investigates marine biomaterial extraction, toxicology and genetic engineering.
Erica Enriquez (Columbia MFA ‘24) involves sculpture, video, photography, and sound as collaborators for performance. She is also the leader of CHOO CHOO – an indie rock band which is available to listen to on all streaming platforms.
Elisheva Gavra (Columbia MFA ‘24) has a practice with photography and performance treated as systems of designation. She is interested in photography as a belief system, and in the possibility for an audience to question those beliefs.
Fadl Fakhouri (Columbia MFA ‘22) centers on dots and lines as a method of pursuing definition and positionality. Through the utility of body, images and contextualized objects, they formulate poetic statements of determination.
Benjamin Salesse (Columbia MFA ’24) creates photographic objects that don’t pretend to defy nature — encased in an air-tight, light- protected, gravity-defying enclosure — but “a living organism” in a transient state that captures the beauty and tragedy of its condition.
