Artist in Focus: Nour Ouayda: Programme 2

Conceived in collaboration with Nour Ouayda, this selection of shorts takes the artist’s 2019 film One Sea, Ten Seas as a starting point to explore how camera can mediate the experience of oceanic flux – a motif that has been integral to the cinema since its earliest days and which continues to figure as a rich reservoir of aesthetic and political possibilities in the present. As Ouayda describes One Sea, Ten Seas, “There are all in all eight tapes dating from 2014 to 2018, each containing footage of the Mediterranean Sea, more precisely a small section of the coast around Beirut. Three women examine the recorded images and sounds, looking for traces of what they call ‘apparitions.’” Throughout the programme, whether in Ouayda’s emphatically digital textures or in photochemical works by Rose Lowder and Peter Hutton, the oceanic expanse opens onto perspectives that exceed the single individual and lead one to consider the inhuman beauty of our terraqueous planet.

Curated by Erika Balsom