For this new season of the dv_vd series, a collaboration between Vidéographe and Dazibao, curators Mena El Shazly and Mohamed Allam present a program of five works produced under the direction of Lebanese filmmaker and video artist Ghassan Salhab as part of the creative workshops for the 10th edition of the Cairo Video Festival. The Motion of the Image examines the relationship between the world and the images of which we are all producers, actors and spectators.

The Motion of the Image

While its presence strengthens and diversifies in our daily life, the question of the image has certainly become more radical. We are more than ever confronted with images from a growing variety of critical and spectatorial points of view. These images that we produce, invoke, and look at, also observe and oversee us. We are thus as much the creators and producers as the actors and participants of this continuous spectacle of which we are, in the end, the witnesses and spectators. This round of images does not cease to haunt the world, threatening it while also being threatened by it.

How to see and hear beyond this constant murmur?

The Cairo Video Festival presents five recent Medrar productions by Helena Abdelnasser & Joseph Adel, Hossam Waleed, Nadia Ghanem, Sama Waly, and Sherouk Helal. These works are the result of the video art and experimental film production workshop entitled “The Motion of the Image”, which took place in 2021 under the supervision of Ghassan Salhab, a Lebanese writer and director born in Dakar, Senegal. 

This workshop is part of a series of production training courses organized by Medrar for Contemporary Art since 2006 to encourage collaborations and consolidate a growing community of artists and filmmakers working with the moving image. Each workshop invites applicants residing in Cairo to discuss, develop, and produce a piece based on a proposed concept. Later, the participants are assisted in the realization of their ideas, from the conceptual process to planning, production, post-production, screenings, and distribution of the works.