United Arab Emirates 2019

Title: “Nujoom Alghanem: Passage”
Artist: Nujoom Alghanem
Curators: Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath
Commissioner: The Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation
Supported by: UAE Ministry of Culture and Knowledge Development 

The exhibition features  new video installation by award-winning poet and filmmaker Nujoom Alghanem. The site-specific work has been closely conceived and developed with the Pavilion curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath.
Passage is a two-channel video installation, which expands Nujoom Alghanem’s experimentation with contemporary Arabic poetry through the language of film. Poetry plays a central role in this immersive, site-specific installation, which takes her quintessential 2009 poem, The Passerby Collects the Moonlight, as a point of departure. Passage continues Alghanem’s reflection on themes of estrangement and her unyielding persistence to capture the universal human dimension of displacement. Two films are projected on the opposite sides of a 3 × 6 meter screen, which is diagonally positioned at the centre of the pavilion, dividing the space into two symmetrical halves. They are bound by one shared soundtrack, which evokes a different meaning on each side of the screen. Poetry plays a central role in this immersive installation, which takes her quintessential 2009 poem, “The Passerby Collects the Moonlight”, as a point of departure.