What does the ground unleash when it is denied keeping what it holds? How does soil get implicated in the carrying of catastrophe? And how does continuous excavation for artefacts reveal an obsession to erase history in order to create a new one? Against this erasure, how have material knowledges of burning, plastering, and burying offered different approaches to the ground—one where land and flesh are bound together in a rhythm of constant transformation? These are some of the questions we’ll be engaging with during this program, which will expand on the works of Areej Ashhab and Ola Hassanain, in the flour, water, soil exhibition, and bring in the work of Dina Mimi, to open up a conversation about the artefact as witness, the erasure of history through excavation, the objects and topologies of repair, and the relationship of people to their material environments.
Areej will be sharing excerpts from her film Lime Through the Elements, and connecting them to her new installation, The Ground Keeps What it Holds, commissioned for this exhibition. The work engages ancient burial practices in Palestine and the aftermath of their settler-colonial excavation. Through field research, experimentation, and collective labor, the film revisits the lost practice of lime making in Palestine and its elemental journey back to limestone as a reflection on return—what survives erasure and elimination.
We will also be screening Dina Mimi’s short film The Eyes That Never See, which narrates the story of Ram(z)i, a lonely working class man who died twice. Ram(z)i was renamed as soon as his first body died, to die again in Jerusalem, under the dusty ground while digging for artefacts from a 6,000 year-old ancient city. Just like in Areej’s work, Dina’s film exposes the obsessions of a settler state that continuously excavates, digging deep into the ground, to find artefacts in order to create new histories.
Ola will present her spatial installation for the exhibition, Water Collection Points, and contextualise it within her ongoing project Tell The Water What The Clay Kept Secret. The work uses water collection points across the exhibition space to make visible the efforts to repair the environment that emerge at the onset of catastrophes. Framed as a site for the ‘ecology of repair’, Ola examines this collective effort to deal with crisis by highlighting roles within communities—especially those living near water—where watching and listening emerge as spatial practices shaped by environmental and political rupture.
The films and talks will be followed by a conversation between Ola, Dina, and Areej, moderated by Margarita Osipian—interweaving their individual works and the stories that unfold through them.
Ticket: €7,50
Student and solidarity ticket: €5
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Areej Ashhab is an artist and researcher whose work addresses material heritage loss, more-than-human ecologies, and land politics. Areej’s practice spans material experimentation, writing, and film, and often unfolds collectively through walks, workshops, and shared meals. She is the co-founder of Al-Block, documenting lost narratives of the Palestinian landscape through collective walking, and Al-Wah’at, a translocal collective countering anthropocentric and colonial narratives around arid lands and futures. In her recent project A Hand of Fire and Stone, she traced abandoned lime pits in Palestine, built a lime kiln prototype in Bethlehem, and activated this lost architecture through fire, songs, and meals; following the elemental cycle of lime from stone, to paste, and back to stone.
Ola Hassanain is an artist whose work moves through architecture, film, and spatial strategies to reflect on how power becomes visible—and felt—through built environments. Her practice engages with places shaped by climate instability, postcolonial legacies, and displacement, thinking through the politics of inhabiting and how ecological and social systems shape one another across time. As she notes, “observation summons a form of power”.
Dina Mimi is an artist working in experimental film and moving image, exploring how, and when, bodies become sites of resistance. Often using found footage to explore themes including smuggling and tactics of movement, her work adopts non-linear forms of narration. She approaches editing as an open and exploratory process, experimenting with the opacity of footage—images that are in the act of vanishing.
