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With artists Basma AlSharif, Coleman Collins, Sky Hopinka, Emily Jacir, Joe Namy, and Oraib Toukan, ON LANDSCAPES, RUINS AND PATTERNS OF REMEMBERING is a program of video works that unfold a politics of image-making, reviewing and recounting social and cultural histories as they are explored through contemporary frameworks. The program is prompted by a work from the ArteArchive—Toukan’s performance video, Remind me to Remember to Forget (2006), after Mahmoud Darwish’s 1982 prose poem, “Memory for Forgetfulness.” The artist proposes to reverse the act of writing and the will to remember, consequently dispersing the written word and suspending it in memory and reimagination.
Revisiting Toukan’s video eighteen years later, in a global context that remains anxious with war and impending invasions, Remind me to Remember to Forget is revisited in conversation with works by Alsharif, Collins, Hopinka, Jacir, and Namy. Through minimalist experiments and lyrical narratives the works address profound violences of colonial erasure of land and people, the legacies of exile and dispersion, and our relationship to objects and images when only image and replica remain.
In their distinct structural explorations of cycles and repetitions, these works deal with the promises and devastating blunders of modernity. They connect to land, time, and space in a contemporary world charged with a renewed authoritarian tendency that swings from guise and symbolism to blatant and annihilating power. Between lived experiences and replicated environments, these works present a receding natural world, real and imagined sites, and archives that render the architectures of a modern time swept up in a coup of capitalist developments and techno-autocratic fascist regimes.
ON LANDSCAPES, RUINS AND PATTERNS OF REMEMBERING is curated by Fwaz Kabra and is co-presented by ArteEast and e-flux. This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. A selection of works from the program will be screened in-person at e-flux on Tuesday, September 24, followed by a Q&A between Emily Jacir, Coleman Collins and Fawz Kabra. For more details about the in-person screening on September 24, visit e-flux.com. The full program will be screened online on artearchive.org from September 19 - 29.
Primarily derived from 3D scans of objects, and with a particular focus on digital replicas of West African architectural sites, Specular fiction is a short, speculative narrative video that traces the complex relationships between seemingly dichotomous terms: original and copy; object and image; real and virtual space. In an imagined future of indeterminate distance, the objects of the world have been destroyed, leaving only the mirror-world of their digital replicas behind. Specular fiction expands upon the artist’s ongoing research into the resonances between notions of diaspora and technological methods of transmission, copying, and reiteration.
About the Filmmaker:
Coleman Collins (b. 1986, Princeton, NJ) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Collins received his MFA from UCLA, Los Angeles in 2018 and was a 2017 resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, ME. He participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 2019. Previous exhibitions and screenings have taken place at Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Herald St, London, UK (2024); Soldes, Los Angeles, CA (2023); the Palestine Festival of Literature, Jerusalem, IS/Ramallah, PS (2023); Hesse Flatow, New York, NY (2022); Brief Histories, New York, NY (2022); Carré d’Art, Nîmes, FR (2022); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, AT (2021); Nothing Special, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY (2019); Artspace, New Haven, CT (2019) and Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA (2018). His work is in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Collins is a 2022 recipient of a Graham Foundation research grant and has received support from NYFA and Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. He is currently Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine.
- Year2024
- Runtime8 minutes
- LanguageEnglish
- CountryUnited States
- Subtitle LanguageEnglish
- DirectorColeman Collins
With artists Basma AlSharif, Coleman Collins, Sky Hopinka, Emily Jacir, Joe Namy, and Oraib Toukan, ON LANDSCAPES, RUINS AND PATTERNS OF REMEMBERING is a program of video works that unfold a politics of image-making, reviewing and recounting social and cultural histories as they are explored through contemporary frameworks. The program is prompted by a work from the ArteArchive—Toukan’s performance video, Remind me to Remember to Forget (2006), after Mahmoud Darwish’s 1982 prose poem, “Memory for Forgetfulness.” The artist proposes to reverse the act of writing and the will to remember, consequently dispersing the written word and suspending it in memory and reimagination.
Revisiting Toukan’s video eighteen years later, in a global context that remains anxious with war and impending invasions, Remind me to Remember to Forget is revisited in conversation with works by Alsharif, Collins, Hopinka, Jacir, and Namy. Through minimalist experiments and lyrical narratives the works address profound violences of colonial erasure of land and people, the legacies of exile and dispersion, and our relationship to objects and images when only image and replica remain.
In their distinct structural explorations of cycles and repetitions, these works deal with the promises and devastating blunders of modernity. They connect to land, time, and space in a contemporary world charged with a renewed authoritarian tendency that swings from guise and symbolism to blatant and annihilating power. Between lived experiences and replicated environments, these works present a receding natural world, real and imagined sites, and archives that render the architectures of a modern time swept up in a coup of capitalist developments and techno-autocratic fascist regimes.
ON LANDSCAPES, RUINS AND PATTERNS OF REMEMBERING is curated by Fwaz Kabra and is co-presented by ArteEast and e-flux. This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. A selection of works from the program will be screened in-person at e-flux on Tuesday, September 24, followed by a Q&A between Emily Jacir, Coleman Collins and Fawz Kabra. For more details about the in-person screening on September 24, visit e-flux.com. The full program will be screened online on artearchive.org from September 19 - 29.
Primarily derived from 3D scans of objects, and with a particular focus on digital replicas of West African architectural sites, Specular fiction is a short, speculative narrative video that traces the complex relationships between seemingly dichotomous terms: original and copy; object and image; real and virtual space. In an imagined future of indeterminate distance, the objects of the world have been destroyed, leaving only the mirror-world of their digital replicas behind. Specular fiction expands upon the artist’s ongoing research into the resonances between notions of diaspora and technological methods of transmission, copying, and reiteration.
About the Filmmaker:
Coleman Collins (b. 1986, Princeton, NJ) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Collins received his MFA from UCLA, Los Angeles in 2018 and was a 2017 resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, ME. He participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 2019. Previous exhibitions and screenings have taken place at Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Herald St, London, UK (2024); Soldes, Los Angeles, CA (2023); the Palestine Festival of Literature, Jerusalem, IS/Ramallah, PS (2023); Hesse Flatow, New York, NY (2022); Brief Histories, New York, NY (2022); Carré d’Art, Nîmes, FR (2022); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, AT (2021); Nothing Special, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY (2019); Artspace, New Haven, CT (2019) and Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA (2018). His work is in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Collins is a 2022 recipient of a Graham Foundation research grant and has received support from NYFA and Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. He is currently Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine.
- Year2024
- Runtime8 minutes
- LanguageEnglish
- CountryUnited States
- Subtitle LanguageEnglish
- DirectorColeman Collins